Thursday, November 21, 2013

BlackBerry


BlackBerry

By Simarjeet Kaur & Vafa Azadi

In our presentation, we discussed about BlackBerry’s current position in market. BlackBerry is Canadian Telecommination and wireless equipment company, which is started in 1984 as a known as Research in motion limited. It was founded by two people named Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin. In 1999, they introduce their products name BlackBerry Enterprise Server and BlackBerry 850 pager. Those two devices were famous for giving access to emails, web browsing, and many other features  Most of the corporative people used those phones over period of the times. Then they introduce another blackberry wireless handset RIM 957. The primary functions of these devices are receiving or send email.

In later years, they introduce couple other models such as BlackBerry Pearl, Curve and Bold. Pearl includes a digital camera, audio and video playback, blackberry maps and voice activated dialing. These different models were specially designed for non corporative people and spread the BlackBerry all over the nation, but in 2007, apple released their first iphone which affected BlackBerry in market. Since apple’s iphone was only exclusive to AT&T network, Verizon wanted BlackBerry to come up something similar in order to gain customers’ interest back in BlackBerry so then BlackBerry released their new product BlackBerry Storm in late 2008, but it didn’t gain much attention from customers. In order to keep up with market, in 2010 blackberry released playbook which was very expensive in the beginning and they had almost 90% loss in sale.

In share market, in 1997, BlackBerry’s IPO price was $7.25 and there highest stock price $144 occurred in June, 2008. Now, there current stock price is $6. BlackBerry’s Market shares from 2008 through 2013 are constantly dropping down. In 2008, the market share was 16.6%, In 2009 the market share was 19.9%. There was gain of 3%. In 2010, the market share was 14.6%. In 2011, the market share was 8.8%. In 2012 the market share was 5.2% and in 2013 the market share is only 1.8%. By comparing to other companies like Apple and Android, there share market is increasing every year compare to the previous year, but in case of BlackBerry, there share dropped down every year. As the other companies are growing faster, the BlackBerry is keep going down.

In recent news, there are lots of things happened in BlackBerry. In past week, they replaced their old CEO name Thorsten Heins with new CEO John Chen. Chen was previously chairman and CEO with Sybase inc. in 1998. In his contract, Company also agreed to give him 13 million BlackBerry share units which are worth US$85 million based on last week’s closing stock price. There was other news about BlackBerry buyout. Companies like Google, Intel and Cisco were interested in buying BlackBerry and other partnerships are still possible with the conditions of new stock price deal with Fairfax. At Same time, the Smartphone maker announced that they aren’t selling itself for $4.7 billion to a group of companies led by Fairfax Financial Holding Limited, but they are agreed for $1billion stock purchase with that group. BlackBerry released their secret investors for $1 billion US dollar investments such as Canso Investment Counse LTE will invest $300 million, Fairfax Financial will invest $250 million, Mackenzie Financial Corporation with $200 million, Market Corporation and Qatar Holding LLC will invest $100 million each, and Brookfield Asset Management will invest $50 million. Most of these investors are Canadian investor.

 

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