BlackBerry may draw new battle lines in its smartphone war with Apple, Nokia and Samsung following raising of $1 billion in debt from its largest shareholder and other investors, experts said.
While experts are still debating if the amount is enough for a turnaround, the investment, which comes after attempt for sale was abandoned, removes the cloud over the company.
“Being the No.4 smartphone player, BlackBerry continues to have a large market share, and the $1 billion cash infusion should be used to re-engineer the product to increase its customer share,” an analyst said.
BlackBerry’s decline is because it was unable to keep up with technology cannibalisation and accordingly make changes to its core product, which has essentially remained the same since the last 10 years, while its competitors have leaped ahead, an official from a rival company said, on condition of anonymity.
Experts said even if BlackBerry ultimately ditches its handsets, it can survive by just sharing its robust and secure enterprise and email platform with other handset manufacturers, just like it did for BBM.
They said Android and other users may even be willing to pay a premium to get Blackberry-integrated software in their handsets, which would result in extra monetisation for BlackBerry and increase its subscriber base as well. Case in point is Intel, which made a fortune after leasing out its software to rival PC players like Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc, they said.
Anshul Gupta of IT research firm Gartner, said, “BlackBerry’s rivals are already seeing opportunities in the enterprise business and working to improve that in their own systems.
Currently, there is a lot of apprehension even from BlackBerry’s huge enterprise subscriber base, but this can change if BlackBerry adds more applications and services to its new BlackBerry 10 platform, and improves its enterprise and infrastructure ecosystem.”
However, some remain sceptical. Nokia wasn’t able to survive and ultimately had to sell out to Microsoft, so BlackBerry’s survival on its own is doubtful, said a source.
Hemant Joshi of Deloitte, a global consulting firm, said, “The battelines are being drawn between Apple, Android and Windows platforms, and all these players have invested a lot more than $1 billion to improve their offerings.”
The company’s sale was abandoned after $4.7 billion offer by its largest shareholder Fairfax Financial Holdings, led by India-born Prem Watsa, fell through.
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