BlackBerry to focus on enterprise market: CEO John Chen
09 Jan 2014
New BlackBerry CEO John Chen has denied that the Canadian firm was a "niche player" in the smartphone market and insisted the company could return to profit by 2016.
He told mediapersons at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, that it would be achieve this through focusing on corporations and business users.
He was reported by The Telegraph as saying if he had a dollar he needed to spend between the consumer segment and the enterprise segment, he would spend it on enterprise for now.
Chen added that BlackBerry would not release any new devices for consumers, rather than business users, in "the foreseeable future," virtually conceding that the company could no longer compete with the behemoths of Apple and Samsung in the consumer market.
"We will have a set of phones that are aiming at consumers but I don't think we will have set of phones that pitch against competitor phones," he explained. "We need to uniquely call out what's good about our phones. If you go after other people's phones by definition you've fallen behind."
Chen said for the next 18 months development would be focused on the enterprise segment.
In a separate interview Chen confirmed that BlackBerry phones would predominantly boast physical keyboards.
Chen told Bloomberg in an interview that he personally loved keyboards.
In the past year, former boss Thorsten Heins had tried to steer BlackBerry into the touchscreen age with phones like the Z10, although the company did offer the clicky key-equipped Q5 and Q10.
