Barcelona: John Chen, Chief Executive Officer of BlackBerry, said at the Mobile World Congress that the company is back on track and the turnaround is running ahead of his own two-year plan.
“We are generating cash for the last two quarters and a lot of progress has been made in our technology road map,” he said.
As the company laid out its road map for the year, he said that BlackBerry is going to make a business out of its software solutions.
After many, many quarters of burning cash, he said the company is stabilising and the trend is going to continue for the year.
However, he said that he couldn’t say more given the company is in a quiet period ahead of its next earnings report on March 27.
BlackBerry, which was disconnected from Verizon and AT&T on the retail side, is quite happy with the deal as the two telecom operators have recently resumed carrying BlackBerry phones in store.
Chen said that many of the popular features from the BlackBerry handsets onto cross platforms — iOS, Android and Windows. It also announced a cloud version of its server software for managing mobile devices.
He said that cross-platform compatibility is one of the frontiers that the company is aggressively pursuing to see if it can gain access to as many people as possible.
The company made $250 million (Dh919.5 million) revenues from the software side last year and Chen is confident of doubling it this year.
“We’re committed to make software as a business,” he said, adding that the company hopes to manage all manner of devices — basically anything with an IP address.
“We did a lot of work on BBM and getting ready to make money from the enterprise and the consumer side. BlackBerry has added two new features to BBM two days ago and has got robust plans for messaging technology,” he said.
Even though BlackBerry’s market share is dwindling and it is now below one per cent, Chen is confident of increasing its market share with the new devices.
Chen plans to revive its smartphone business by pushing security and messaging software to all devices.
“We’re going to make sure our software technology addresses everybody’s phones and everybody’s endpoint solutions,” Chen said.
When asked why the company is introducing an all-touch device when it is focusing on keyboard, Chen said that the keyboard device is catered to a certain sector and the full-touch device to a certain sector.
During his final remarks, Chen also talked up plans to license the company’s 45,000 patents.
He said that he is not a believer in holding on to the secret sauces and it is important for shareholders that the company makes the most of that value.