BlackBerry is very much a niche company these days. Once titans of the mobile world, their refusal to adopt Android as their OS of choice nearly ended them. At least that would’ve been the case if Chinese company TCL hadn’t swooped in at the last moment to acquire them. Now, BlackBerry is back in business, and they’re feeling pretty good about themselves.
The company isn’t shipping the huge numbers they once did, with only 850,000 units sold in 2017. Company executives seem pretty happy with these numbers however, citing the BlackBerry KeyONE as an “unqualified success”. This has more to do with the company’s devices being available on more direct sales channels than their sales however.
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Apparently one of the main problems BlackBerry has been facing are their old reputation. BlackBerry runs on Android now, giving users access to the Google Play Store’s millions of apps, but many consumers aren’t aware of that. This is mainly due to BlackBerry’s past insistence on running an OS with anemic app support.
Coming off of this “success,” it seems BlackBerry has fairly big plans for the next few years. One executive claims that BlackBerry hopes to capture between 3% and 5% of the premium smartphone market. BlackBerry would need to sell around 10 million phones a year to reach that goal, so it’s still a long ways off. We wish them the best of luck though.
