In an interview with Business Insider, BlackBerry CEO John Chen says he’ll make BlackBerry’s smartphone business profitable again.
Under Chen, BlackBerry has refocused its business toward enterprise and governments instead of normal consumers.
If things are so bleak, then why does BlackBerry continue to make smartphones at all?
Chen says BlackBerry phones are the entry point for customers into the company’s security business. BlackBerry can still provide a secure backbone for other devices like iPhones and Android phones, but Chen says you get the most security with a BlackBerry phone. There are a lot of important customers that still need that level of security.
“I can only make iPhone so much more secure, but I can’t make it as secure as a BlackBerry device,” Chen said.
“If you look at the US Army, they’re still rolling out all BlackBerry. If I tell them there are no more phones, I lose that account. The question is how do you make phones profitable at the volume those people represent?”
In other words, there are a lot of specialized customers like the military, governments, and certain big companies that need the security BlackBerry promises with its phones.
Chen seems to think there’s an opportunity to make the phone business profitable, but he’s not saying exactly how he’ll pull it off other than pointing to BlackBerry’s advantage in security and building on top of that with unique designs like the BlackBerry Passport.
“It’s a combination of everything,” Chen said. “First of all you really do have to have a focus on design. At the end of the day, a big part of this is about the product.
