BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) (TSE:BB) will not be happy from few of the recent reports that presented a bleak picture of the company in the UK. The reports suggested that the Canadian firm would have fewer than 1 million users outside businesses in the UK by the end of the year. This is a sharp decline from a peak of nearly 8 million in June 2012, according to a report from The Guardian.
BlackBerry losing users to rivals
A report from eMarketer, said that the company has around 700,000 non-business users in the UK, and these figures could fall to 400,000 by the end of 2017.
Bill Fisher, an analyst at eMarketer said that the latest figures show that the loyal customer of the company are leaving it, adding, “its market share has been decimated by Android and iOS, and more recently by Windows Phone, which is slowly gaining a foothold in the UK market.”
Separately, another research firm, Kantar Worldpanel, told the Guardian that even though BlackBerry still holds 1.4 million non-business users, every month it is losing 56,000 users to rivals such as iOS, Android and Windows.
“I’d expect we would see fewer than a million people with a BlackBerry as their primary handset around September 2015,” Dominic Sunnebo, global consumer insight director at Kantar told the Guardian.
Not a sudden decline
A fall from 8 million to 1 million is not a sudden process. The company was once considered as a maker of iconic mobile phones, but afterwards it failed to change its technology to match the shift in the consumer preferences.
UK market was considered to be one of BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) (TSE:BB)’s biggest and most loyal baser, but soon the company reported a loss of consumers as both Apple and Samsung begun to make inroads there by winning approval from the authorities in the US and UK.
Even though the Canadian firm is shifting its focus, it still depends heavily on its handset sales. BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) (TSE:BB) CEO, John Chen said previously that the company needs to sell around 10 million units to be profitable. However, falling user numbers mean fewer sales, and a spiraling problem for the company.
