BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) (TSE:BB) was the favorite phone for the corporate customers few years back, but it was slow to respond to the changing market and was taken over by manufacturers like Samsung and Apple. The company is struggling hard to gain back its glory, and for this it has offered different kinds of smartphones including Passport, Classic and Z10. However, a report Wall Street analyst informs that the key decision makers are resistant to the attempts that the company is making to win back its corporate customers.
CIOs shying away from BlackBerry
Last June, there were 22% chief information officers out of 150 in the U.S. and Europe willing to evaluate BlackBerry’s server software for managing their employees’ smartphones, and the percentage had declined to 15% in the survey undertaken recently by Morgan Stanley analyst James Faucette. Number of respondents doubled to 21, who evaluated BlackBerry’s software during this time period, and decided to take a pass.
“BlackBerry was at or near the top in several categories like “No plans to evaluate,” Mr. Faucette wrote in a report on Tuesday, adding “hardly the indication of burgeoning interest” to support the company’s share price.
BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) (TSE:BB) is being followed by several analysts, and Faucette is among the most pessimist one. He has given a price target of $7.00 to the stock, which is lower by 30% to the Canadian firm’s Monday closing price on the NASDAQ.
What led to BalckBerry’s downfall?
A few years back, BlackBerry was the favorite among the corporate and the government or the enterprise market. Its position was threatened and weakened by few policies undertaken by the corporate such as ‘bring your own device.’ Also, there was emergence of strong rivals in the smartphone market that led to the downfall of BlackBerry. Besides that, the company could not update its software with time that would have allowed enterprises of multiple types of devices simultaneously. The other major flaw was that the new BlackBerry 10 platform lacked compatibility with the earlier BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) (TSE:BB) products.
However, BlackBerry CEO John Chen is taking several measures to turn the company around and correct the market stumbles by introducing new software. The new software’s will help the corporations in efficient and centralized management of all the previous platforms of Blackberry along with Apple and Android smartphones. But it seems that Chen’s efforts are going well with the CIOs that Faucette has surveyed.
