BlackBerry Ltd. (BBRY, Financial), a company based at Waterloo, Canada, is reducing the number of working employees across all its offices throughout the world. One of the biggest smartphone manufacturers is now aiming at merging its various business units such as hardware, software, and applications to strengthen its operations.
Motive behind the action
BlackBerry made the decision to make its manufacturing unit productive again. It is also keeping a keen eye on increasing the sales of better-margin mobile segment and software designed for security. This move will play a significant role in inducing a burning growth again. BlackBerry had failed in 2013 in competing against its peers such as Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. (SSNLF, Financial) and Apple Inc. (AAPL, Financial) in the smartphone sector. This failure also put pressure to minimize the costs incurred in the operations and step up the number of potential government and corporate clients.
The falling of market share to less than a percent put pressure on the company to move towards government employees and professionals.
Number of employees affected
However, the number of employees to be laid off has not been disclosed by BlackBerry. A spokesperson said that the company will lay off employees working in its device unit. The employees engaged in applications and the smartphones unit will also be laid off.
The company had shared in April about its plans of shutting down its centers in Sweden. This move will put about 100 employees out of the operations. A spokeswoman from BlackBerry has not confirmed if all the 100 employees would be laid off. According to the data, the company had about 7,000 old employees by the end of September 2014.
Adopting new approach according to the quarter performance
The smartphone manufacturer is now aiming at software that would help increase yield and provide secure framework for iPhones, and devices offered by Google’s (GOOG, Financial) android operating systems. With the company’s revenue falling by 32% in fourth quarter that ended on February 28, it has planned to allocate the resources in such a way that will enable in capitalizing on opportunities triggering growth. The sole objective will be to maintain consistent yield across all the phases of the business project. The revenue again fell by 16.8% in March, when the company had 6,225 employees working as full time as recorded on February 28.
Future plans from the boardroom
BlackBerry said in a statement that they will build customer-centric teams around the globe, and make efforts to hire new people in support areas so as to emphasize around security, software, enterprise solution and the Internet of things. CEO John Chen said the company has started hiring a number of talented engineers towards its goal.
A statement by Chen in August 2014 also threw light on the future plans of growing and restructuring after layoffs. The company is directing towards inventing applications that can be run on other mobiles. Revenue is coming down, but the company is removing the losses, and putting forward the profits. Though, there has been a fall of 4.6 percent in the shares this year, the company has come forward by 2 percent to $10.48 (U.S.) as recorded in the recent close.
Chen is also claiming to power 50 million connected cars currently with the help of its operating system. It has also planned to launch a certificate scheme to provide the same security from meters to cars as it offers on smartphones. Certicom, a new functioning unit with BlackBerry, has planned a new offering that will secure a number of devices and be a part of the Internet sphere.
