Tag: blackberry ceo

As the company works to rebuild itself, John Chen has explained that good talent is hard to keep.

BlackBerry CEO John Chen has now stated that it is not only difficult to find good mobile technology talent, but it is also very hard to keep it, which is clearly a challenge that the company is facing as it works on rebuilding.

This challenge becomes much harder when trying to hire on a last-minute basis, while avoiding lost time.

Chen spoke in a Thomson Reuters interview, last week, at the third annual Waterloo Innovation Summit in Canada. He explained that the main problem is to figure out how not to waste time at the last minute when talent is needed. In 2011, BlackBerry mobile technology had been an employer of 11,000 people in the Waterloo Region of Ontario, Canada.. However, today’s figure has dwindled to 2,700 workers in 2015.

During that period, a great deal of mobile technology talent was lost from the company as it tried to survive.

In the interview, Chen expressed that “We lost a lot of good people as a company. Not everybody is cut out to be a turnaround person or be in a turnaround environment. But if you can do it – I love it -it is fascinating, it is fabulous. The reward that comes at the end, the feeling of it, is hard to describe.”

Chen is now coming close to completing his second year at the helm of BlackBerry. The company had once been the leader in the smartphone category, but its slice of the market is now under 1 percent. The CEO’s strategy involves attracting and keeping the best talent in order to ensure the company’s return to success. In his opinion, this is the greatest challenge that the company is facing, as the goal is to change the turnaround plan from having been the smartphone manufacturing leader into being a company with a focus on internet, software, and services.

The BlackBerry CEO has said that the mobile technology market and its competition can’t be allowed to dictate the future of this category. Instead, he believes that it is up to the participants to carve out the path, and that requires time and patience to accomplish effectively.

John Chen is feeling a good deal better about the company’s prospects regardless of slumping sales.

Outspoken BlackBerry CEO, John Chen, has spent his time at the helm of the company showing that he is not afraid to do things differently in order to allow the Canadian handset maker the opportunity to claw its way back into relevance and profitability and now, despite its slumping sales, it looks as though things have, indeed, been turning to a positive direction.

It now looks as though this has been only a time of sowing seeds that he now feels will spike mobile device sales.

That said, the latest sales results that BlackBerry has revealed have shown that there is still a long way to go before the company can truly feel that it is out of the woods. Indeed, it seems as though the direction that the company has taken is toward a positive turnaround, but at the same time, the efforts remain at the ground level. The genuine growth has yet to kick in. These latest announcements have caused the company’s stock to take a rollercoaster’s path, as analysts struggled to process the true meaning of the good and bad earning news.

There were a number of very important points that were revealed in the recent BlackBerry announcements.

While the sales from the company’s fourth quarter had plummeted by 32 percent when compared to the same quarter the year before, reaching only $660 million (even managing to miss the lowest estimates of $783.1 million for that quarter), there were areas in which the company still did very well. For instance, it sold massive sale of patents and took in a tax recovery of $29 million which boosted the company into an adjusted profit position. In fact, its profit was a boost of $0.04 per share. This represented the second consecutive quarter in which it managed to beat its bottom line after having undergone six painful quarterly losses in a row.

Chen was very positive and spoke to shareholders and analysts during his BlackBerry earnings call, saying that after the company had struggled to the point of nearly drowning, its “financial house is in order”. He also pointed out that the changes that he has made since he took the head position of the company have now started to bear fruit.