

BlackBerry Announces $1B loss, 4500 layoffs and shifts away from consumer market - Brajeshwar
http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/20/blackberry-bombs-announces-1b-loss-4500-layoffs-cutting-operating-costs-by-50-shifting-away-from-consumer-market/

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contextual
If I understand correctly, this billion dollars is a writedown in inventory
and not cash. It's for product that's only been in the channel for a few
months. Good product like the Z10.

Why? This lowers the price of the corporation so it can be taken private. They
are making BlackBerry as affordable as they can, as quickly as they can.

I have a Q10 and I love it. I had a Z10 and I wish I still had it. Great
smartphones with the best OS I've ever used. And just recently they announced
the "flagship" Z30 to get users excited: [http://www.techcentral.co.za/meet-
blackberrys-new-flagship-t...](http://www.techcentral.co.za/meet-blackberrys-
new-flagship-the-z30/43754/)

BlackBerry will be around for a long time, but they will be leaner, wiser and
with a genuinely great product line for the future.

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buyx
The strategy of chasing price conscious consumers seems to have failed. Fairly
recently, Blackberry was voted "coolest youth brand" in South Africa, while
they flooded the market with poorly built, cheap Curves (I had a Curve, which
took 10 minutes to boot). As bandwidth costs have come down, unlimited BIS has
become less important. And people realise that having to give their phones in
for fixing every six months is a poor deal.

I sometimes see the argument that a product being popular in the developing
world is a ray of hope but Nokia's decline (despite dominating feature phone
market with quality phones), along with Blackberry's decline is a signal that
third world consumers are not a long-term cash cow.

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kitcar
One reason why Blackberry holds leadership positions in a few markets is they
work directly with the government to ensure their products don't get hit by
the same import tariffs their competitors do, giving them a very significant
price advantage - for example, they started assembling BB's in Argentina a
while back for this reason ([http://investba.com/2011/07/research-in-motion-
blackberry-ar...](http://investba.com/2011/07/research-in-motion-blackberry-
argentina/)).

In the last few years Apple has started to do the same:
[http://appleinsider.com/articles/12/02/24/apple_begins_selli...](http://appleinsider.com/articles/12/02/24/apple_begins_selling_iphone_4_units_built_in_brazil))

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brianbreslin
Isn't the reason for this because Christina Kirchner's son owns one of the fab
plants? And the tarrifs they impose on imports is prohibitive?

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brianbreslin
A few questions come to mind: How much cash do they have in reserves? Can they
survive till q1 2015 when they say costs will be slashed in half? Does the
enterprise market still care for them enough? Could they survive as a platform
and not a hardware maker (or which side of coin is more profitable for them?)

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GrinningFool
1) about 2.6 billion

2) probably.

3) some segments do.

If they get small enough I suspect they'll be able to sustain operations. It
will probably become quite a lucrative consulting niche.

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brianbreslin
But how small of a consulting biz? would this be something IBM then acquires?

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GrinningFool
I'm not sure about for them - I meant for third parties :) Pretty much any
level of adoption in the enterprise will necessitate development of LOB apps.
Some of those enterprises will do it in-house, but others will not. With BB10
being scarce in the consumer world, there will not be a ton of talent with
experience in building for it.

