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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?
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.
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.
Not sure about that. BlackBerry QNX-based OS is really good. It's not like they don't have a great product, the problem is that the product came late and it was pricey. In any case, it's good to have a variety out there.
Um...
BlackBerry is a Canadian company.