Its latest range of handsets designed to compete with iPhone and Android phones failed to sell in the expected numbers and led to the company recording a $965m operating loss in the three months to August this year, and analyst Gartner has warned BlackBerry customers to consider alternatives.
But despite these difficulties, there are signs that major customers are sticking with the Canadian handset maker. Europe’s second largest car manufacturer PSA Peugeot Citroen is to provide 10,000 Z10 smartphones to staff in France and Spain and is moving to the latest version of BlackBerry’s mobile management system, BlackBerry Enterprise Server 10.
Why has the company chosen BlackBerry? Partly it is down to the fact that the company is already a BlackBerry shop, running a fleet of BlackBerry Curve and Bold devices on BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0.2, so it will not have to invest the cost and time of starting from scratch when setting up its infrastructure to manage the Z10s.
“We have no diversity, no iOS and no Android, and we do not want to go into this technology because it’s costly,” said Eric Marchand, head of telecom at PSA Peugeot Citroen told ZDNet.
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