Slashdot Mirror
BlackBerry Posts $4.4 Billion Loss, Will Outsource To Foxconn
iONiUM writes "Today BlackBerry announced a $4.4 billion loss, and a deal with Foxconn to outsource hardware manufacturing. One interesting stat is that 75% of sales were actually older BB7 devices. That said, CEO John Chen says, 'We are very much alive, thank you.' He adds, 'Our "for sale" sign has been taken down and we are here to stay. BlackBerry recently announced it has entered into an agreement to receive a strategic investment from Fairfax Financial and other institutional investors, which represents a vote of confidence in the future of BlackBerry.'"
'Our "for sale" sign has been taken down and we are here to stay.'
This is the textbook precursor words before a "transition team" chops it up for parts and sells everything off piecemeal. It's right in the MBA manual.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
They need to focus on business end Android phones with hardware keyboards.
I'm not dead yet!
Sig: I stole this sig.
Engineering is dead. Once the service economy of the U.S.A. implodes, so will these job.
American engineering is very much alive. The same can't be said for high tech manufacturing.
...then license your tablet and phone OS immediately.
The tablet OS never, ever crashes, runs any Gingerbread app, and is a far superior experience to Android. Blackberry should give the OS away for free for any tablet that has CPUs under 1ghz (as long as the vendor writes the drivers).
The phone OS builds on the tablet, will load any .APK, runs other vendors' market apps, and is judged a far, far superior experience by Android converts. Blackberry should give the phone OS away to any vendor running CPUs under 800Mhz (as long as the vendor writes the drivers).
If Blackberry takes market share, it will win. This cannot be done as a vertically-integrated platform.
This $4.4B loss is one of those "throw everything out including the kitchen sink" financial quarters, where a struggling, money-losing public company tries to purge itself and basically write everything off at once, including expenses/charges that may not have happened yet. The purpose of this financial engineering is partly to make future earnings look better, both on a comparable basis but more importantly because so many expenses got thrown into the loss and so future revenue will have fewer expenses charged against it, giving the appearance of an earnings recovery. The stock is heavily shorted by smart money and they know this large "loss" is guaranteed result in future positive earnings "surprises" so they'd rather take their short earnings off the table and let the dumb money fight it out in the intermediate term.
We will never be in a DBA bubble as long as data is king. For most companies, their database is an order of magnitude more valuable than their code base.
"We think that by giving you money, you're either going to be a legitimate competitor again and give us a great return on our investment or else we're going to get our money back when we chop you up into pieces because we own you. You're on limited time to do either."
In other words, someone gave them a loan. How badly BB got shafted by that loan is determined by how desperate they were when they took it. BB either paid them in stock, which means voting power over the company's assets when / if it folds, or else they owe them money and their patent portfolio will be sold to them when BB goes bankrupt to pay the debts.
Strategic investment means somebody from the outside taking a big stake in the company.
Fairfax Financial is a insurance company and the biggest owner of BlackBerry shares. The original idea was that FairFax and some partners would do a buy out of all the existing shares for 4.7b and take BlackBerry private – like what Dell did with Dell inc. this year. That fell through when Fairfax couldn’t find any partners who were willing to up the cash. Instead BlackBerry issued 1b in convertible debt (bonds that can be converted to stock – all the downside protection of debt and all of the upside of stock ownership.) with FairFax buying 250m of that debt.
I'm in canada, and we can't keep our engineers bottled up. Their 3rd year co-ops started paying more than starting faculty positions, so we had to change the rules and forcibly limit them to about 26 an hour.
Our graduates are going all over in canada and the US, starting salaries 70-80k. And we aren't a particularly spectacular engineering school. Electrical, mechanical, I don't know about civil, computer and software. (I've never had anything to do with the civil people as I'm in CS and our cross courses that I have been involved in are only with the others).
If you can't find work either people don't think your degree is legit, or you're doing a terrible job presenting yourself. Hell, our graduates who can barely communicate in english are getting great jobs.
Say what? We still make airplanes, cars, processors, drugs, etc. in this country. If you don't consider that high tech manufacturing, I don't know what is then.
Hell, our graduates who can barely communicate in english are getting great jobs.
That's because the first thing an employer thinks when they find someone with broken English is "Cool, temporary worker, I don't have to provide benefits!", A 70k job without benefits in Boston or Silicon Valley is basically equivalent to a minimum wage job in other parts of the USA. You can live on it, but its got no future.
I graduated in the 2001 meltdown, and was unable to get engineering work. I took whatever work I could get, but ultimately, I joined a start-up instead. Where I currently live, there is nothing in engineering jobs within 200 miles in any direction. I'm not saying there is nothing worth having, I'm saying there is nothing at all. I went looking to find out what I should offer when i needed to bring on my first employee, and discovered I could offer 30k with minimal benefits, and I still got over 300 applications. I ultimately ended up paying 45k with somewhat better benefits, because I was impressed by the guy, but I probably could have held my ground and still got him anyways. Down the road, I expect he will transition well to a leadership role as we grow further.
If you look on monster.com, or dice, for "engineering", there are remarkably few postings. For the geographic northeast USA, there were only 35 new postings per day, for all jobs matching the term "engineering". That is out of a population of 50 million people. By contrast, my school graduated 2000 engineering students the year I graduated. In the US, every year, more than 50k engineering students graduate. That's only enough jobs for the existing graduating class for this country, add to that the 600,000 Chinese graduates and 350,000 Indian graduates who are all competing for these same jobs, its no wonder everyone wants to increase the H1-B visas. If we could expand the labor pool to include both of those labor sources, we can thoroughly unbalance the supply and drive labor costs down. The labor supply in both China and India dramatically outweighs the demand, in large part because of the belief in the ability to enter the american job market. These people do not want to live in the states permanently, just stay a decade or so, and save up to retire "back home". An Indian worker can earn enough in the US in fifteen years to effectively retire when they return to India. For rural Chinese, the duration is even shorter, although the cost of living in China is increasing rapidly. These are people that american companies do not have to pay benefits, nor retirement expenses for. This effectively cuts the payroll expense in half, even if the worker earns the same wage.
As a former job seeker, I fully understand how it sucks. As an employer, I am in a position to pay an american worker, but largely because in my current line of business I have no effective competition yet. When that changes, and I have to compete, I will be taking the least expensive option.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
So which OS do you use on your PC? Windows (engineered in Washington, USA), Mac OS X (engineered in California, USA), or Linux (engineered by a lot of different people, and headed by Linus Torvalds who lives in the USA somewhere)?
Yeah it's TOTALLY "wow somebody with limited English skills, possibly a fresh graduate, and possibly with shaky immigration work status, we can hire a lot of them for peanuts and since they don't know who we are, they'll fall for low salary offers and not complain AT ALL when we don't train them and throw shovels of work at them"
My Canadian employer hires tons of these folks because most of them will work for 1/3rd what they'd normally pay. Lack of common languages means they are isolated in the workplace and keep their heads down and don't ask for anything. Most of them last a year or two before they bail and attempt to cash in a couple years of experience at the company.
It is quite honestly a WTF moment when HR announces we've hired somebody who is not immediately obviously an immigrant -HR passes around photos and little bios on the new hires so yes, we DO know exactly where they are from and what ethnicity they have, what they like to eat, last place they travelled, and so on. The hiring bias is incredible and somewhat of an open joke.
The company does this just because these workers are cheap.
.
Sig for hire.
Um...
BlackBerry is a Canadian company.
Some Chinese companies have learned a neat trick.
Diamond Back did it 20-30 years ago, I suspect Foxconn will do it next.
With the BlackBerry and Apple designs and process knowledge they've provided to Foxconn, Foxconn will soon have little need for these American companies. They can just sell the next generation under the Foxconn brand.