BlackBerry May Simply Ditch Those Handsets That Nobody Wants

If BlackBerry doesn’t start making more money on its handset business, the company will consider exiting the market.

In an interview with Reuters, the company’s chief executive officer said that a decision will be made soon.

“If I cannot make money on handsets, I will not be in the handset business,” said John Shen, who took over as CEO of the struggling company late last year.

The company reported a quarterly net loss of $423 million and a 64% drop on revenues in March.

Chen said that the company is increasingly focusing on providing highly secure communications to regulated industries and financial and legal services, as the revelations about the scope of surveillance by the U.S. government has made businesses and governments focus more on security.

“We are going to be more focused on secure communications, secure messaging,” the CEO said.

“We are building an engineering team on the service side that is focused on security. We are building an engineering team on the device side that is focused on security. We will do some partnerships and we will probably, potentially do an M&A on security.”

[Reuters]