BlackBerry could drop its smartphone business

BlackBerry Limited has reported a massive net loss last month. The Canadian telecommunication and phone manufacturer is searching for a new path that could bring back profit. This looks to be bad news for BlackBerry smartphone business.

The Canadian company was relying on the income brought by smartphones and it did quite well a few years ago. BlackBerry shipped in excess of 50 million devices in 2011 which brought in billions of dollars, but since 2012 its revenues started to plummet. Now the company is thinking about changing its direction and that means letting go of the smartphone business.

BlackBerry's CEO, John Chen confirmed the news. “If I cannot make money on handsets, I will not be in the handset business.” He also said the company is looking into telecommunication security and financial services. “We are building an engineering team on the device side that is focused on security, We will do some partnerships and we will probably, potentially do an M&A on security,” Chen added.

BlackBerry reported recently a quarterly loss of 420 million US dollars and a 64 percent revenue drop. The giant telecom company is facing a serious challenge. John Chen also said the smartphone business can still bring money as long as it ships a minimum of 10 million units per year.

Not so long ago, BlackBerry was a game changer in the smartphone business. In 2009, the Canadian company had a global market share of 20 percent which is absolutely huge. But BlackBerry could not stay up there and market share dropped to less than 2 percent by the end of 2013.