In line with the new development strategy, BlackBerry has laid off 65 employees in its developer relations team.
​​BlackBerry have issued the following statement:
“We recognize our local employees’ hard work on behalf of our company, and the difficulty of this news. And we will do everything in our power to treat our employees with compassion while offering support during this time of transition.”
Last week, BlackBerry announced a licensing deal with Amazon which will bring the Amazon Appstore to BlackBerry 10 devices in October, with the release of the BlackBerry Passport and BlackBerry Classic.
This will bring 240,00 apps targeted at BlackBerry consumers. Amazon will control the content as normal, negating the need for most of the current BlackBerry Relations Group. Meanwhile, BlackBerry app development will focus on Enterprise and productivity apps.
Chen emphasized the company’s focus on the enterprise market at the company’s annual general meeting on Thursday. After the meeting, BlackBerry CEO John Chen said,
“Getting into the enterprise and building a platform we could provide value-added service on an ongoing basis, provides a pretty high traction and margin,”
“That is going to be, in my opinion, how we’re going to turn around this [company] into profitability and growth.”
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