Blackberry Case Study

1. Introduction:
Once a leading manufacturer of wireless communication and embedded software solutions, Blackberry was founded in 1984 in Waterloo, Canada.

In 2008 Blackberry was worth $83billion with a share price of $149.9, it was named by Fortune-magazine as “The world's fastest-growing company”(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8206906.stm)
Today, Blackberry’s share price around the $7 mark which left the company with a market cap of about $3.8B!

In 2007 and after the huge success of apple’s iPhone, Blackberry decided to diversify from the Enterprise market into a new market segment(consumer market) using its existing product(the business phones).
Although the initial results were appealing, the move had a massive negative impact on the company’s future.
Blackberry lost focus on its core business and consequently lost its position as the “Business phone” market leader. Its Market-Share of the smartphone shrank from>21% to below 1%.

In 2013, Fairfax Financial put an offer of $4.7billion to purchase BlackBerry, however the deal didn’t go through, instead, Fairfax agreed to invest $1B in Blackberry.(http://press.blackberry.com/financial/2013/blackberry-receives-investment-of-u-s---1-billion--from-fairfax-.html)

2. Problem approach
This paper will analyse Blackberry’s current strategy and the challenges facing the company and will conclude with a recommended guideline for a new Strategy. The approach will follow the path highlighted on the Strategic Management Process depicted below (Adopted from http://www.planning-strategy.com/):

3. External Analysis:
Several frameworks will be used to better understand the environment, the market and the competition:
3.1. PESTEL
• Political:
Due to the Cyber-security threats on many count...

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...ustomer base that Blackberry has a good and long relationship with. Therefore, such solutions will gain competitive advantage from its link with Blackberry since there is a clear “economies of scope” or “synergies” among the multiple business activities.

Conclusion:
Although many investors have written Blackberry off. It still possible that John Chen can reverse BlackBerry’s fortunes. With all the bad media around it, Blackberry was still able to sell 14 million phones, still being the leader in the Enterprise software business and has QNX, the star of the embedded software market.
Equipped with John Chen and his team and with the right strategy in place, we might still see Blackberry as a Fortune 500 company, if so; John chen will be heralded for rescuing a Canadian Tech icon, possibly on the same level as what Steve Jobs did to save Apple.