A Blackberry logo is seen at the company’s campus in Waterloo, Ontario.
BlackBerry is not dead.
That’s according to interim CEO John Chen, who assumed control of the beleaguered smart phone maker after a consortium led by Canadian financier Prem Watsa injected $1 billion into the company in November. The cash infusion came after Watsa’s group Fairfax Financial abandoned a plan to buy Waterloo, Ontario-based BlackBerry outright in a $4.7 billion deal. Former CEO Thorsten Heins, whose highly-touted turnaround plan never materialized, was ousted as part of BlackBerry’s restructuring process.
On Friday morning, BlackBerry issues its first quarterly earnings reports under Chen. Wall Street expects ugly numbers. BlackBerry shares have lost nearly half of their value so far this year, and the company’s stock is down a whopping 90% since February of 2011. The firm, which not so long ago was the fastest growing company in the world, has become a case study of what happens when a tech giant fails to innovate in consumer technology. In September, BlackBerry, which recently shed the name Research In Motion, announced that it would cut 4,500 jobs as it prepared to absorb nearly $1 billion in losses related to unsold gadget inventory.
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