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Takeover, celebrities or new products; What can save Blackberry?
After many attempts to remain competitive on the smartphone market, Blackberry is still losing out to the likes of Apple and Samsung. It has said it will have to cut 4,500 jobs as it expects to report a loss of nearly USD 1 Billion on Friday. As if that wasn't enough; T-Mobile in the US said it was no longer efficient to keep BlackBerry devices in its stores.
Blackberry's biggest shareholder, Fairfax Financial Holdings, has now offered to buy the troubled company for USD 4.7 billion – the equivalent of a staggering 80 percent discount of its value.
Speaking about the firm's troubles, Husein Kanji, from Hoxton Ventures Partners, says it's all about "who will be the next visionary to turn things around".
Within the next two years, he expects Blackberry to build a "consumer phone that is competitive". He believes this was the idea of the Blackberry 10, but this "didn't work very well."
In a bid to boost its image, Blackberry hired singer Alicia Key as Creative Director of this handset. But Hussein says: "When a company thinks they can hire celebrities to fix things, it’s a warning sign."
With regards to the takeover, Blackberry now has until 4th November to conduct due diligence, in which time it can also seek out other buyers.
The company’s stock price has declined more than 30 percent so far this year.
But despite all negative aspects, Hussein admits he is still a loyal Blackberry user himself, and the reason? It still has a keyboard.
01:22 minutes
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