Blackberry has been losing its marketshare tremendously for the past few years. According to IDC, the company’s marketshare is currently at 2.9%. Blackberry has appointed a special committee to investigate available options for the company to stay in the picture. And this unfortunately includes the sale of the company or partnership with any leading company out there, joint ventures, alliances or what the board calls “other possible transactions”.
The announcement came out today and the official line is that all this is to increase scale and speed up the BlackBerry 10 rollout. The committee is headed by board member Timothy Dattels and CEO Thorsten Heins is on it too. Heins still talks about “exceptional technology that customers are embracing” and a strong balance sheet, but if things were really fine you wouldnt be putting the company on the table like this.
Another interesting bit is that Prem Watsa of Fairfax Financial, the biggest shareholder, has stepped down from the board to avoid conflicts during the process, though Fairfax says it isnt selling its shares for now. The stock was up 5.7% to $10.32 on Monday morning, so investors seem to like it.
In case you were wondering how bad that 2.9% is, IDC says Blackberry shipped just 6.8 million phones last quarter while Android took 79.3%, iOS 13.2% and even Windows Phone is ahead at 3.7%. We do hope someone keeps the platform alive. Stay tuned.
Partly reconstructed with AI. This post’s full text was lost when the site went offline. Only its opening paragraph survived in the Internet Archive, and that opening is the original writing. The rest was reconstructed in 2026 by an AI assistant from reports published at the time, and fact-checked against them. Sources used: globenewswire.com, bgr.com, backup.arabnews.com, industryweek.com.
