BlackBerry Looks to Bounce Back With Priv Phone By Bloomberg Markets and Finance

I've been reading the reviews, as you know, they're mostly positive, though there is a note of skepticism on just how well this phone can do. How important is the device to the future of blackberry? Well, it's always an important device. I mean device is always an important part of our business, but we also know that we are generating a lot of business in the software world, connected cars and everything connected in IOT and all that buzzwords, but so we're doing a lot of different things. So, but it's still very important. Nothing creates as much buzz, though, as a new consumer device. I know.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? It's a good thing. You know it's like you know the learned some time ago that you know you'd like people to talk about you good or bad I. The worst thing is nobody mentioned you. So no, it's a good thing, and we love the attention, and it's kind of challenging. So we love to challenge.

Why well I mean we lost our number one position and number of years ago. You know in 2007, we, like everybody, has a blackberry and Blackberry BBM. You know it's kind of like the everyday word, so a number of things have happened, and we lost that position when trying to come back. So everybody now become a critic. So you know some of them.

Remember the pass and then compared us from that, and some of them thought about the current competition with you know the other Fruit Company, and so I, don't want to mention my competitors. Yeah, many people feel like Apple is unstoppable and the one place they couldn't get into was business because we all use blackberries for work, and then you had CEOs and c-suite executives, walk into their IT department and say I. Have this tablet I have this iPad, and it works, and now that Apple ecosystem has made its way into corporate America? What are you doing about that? That's your dojo! Well! So the first thing we do. What? First we didn't like that happen. So since that happened, and the first thing we did was we created a lot of software that manages everything.

So it's not just managing blackberry, you know. If you talk about NEC change, it was because that you know we make sure that all the know-how that we have, which is huge, a lot of technology managers, could be run on everybody devices and manage their devices. Samsung, Knox and- and you know the company and with Apple and so forth. So that's really important that, but then they're also a category of users that looks for high-end, looks for the keyboard, for productivity, looks at bad read, and you never charge you in the day. I don't even need wireless charging, because all you need to go to the pad, and you park it in, and that was it so you look for all these features and security and privacy and that's what this is for.

So we are addressing a seventh of market, and we hope that market sentiment goes bigger and bigger, and apparently I'm not going to name names on the air. But there was a lot of celebrities now wanting that device. This device, though there are a lot of people, there's a big risk. He had nothing to do with ELISA there's a big risk in tying yourself to celebrities who are saying I backed this product, I love this product and then what happens. They're holding an iPhone right iPhones are cool.

People think that the iPhone product has that great camera. So when you talk about celebrities like your product, this is a dangerous place to play. Oh, absolutely I'm, not asking somebody to publicly endorsing us I, just amazed and happy the fact that they're using it now so that's the know. That's a part of I'm mentioning I'm, not gonna, have a celebrity spokesperson for okay. So if it's not celebrities, how much marketing muscle in dollar terms, are you going to put behind this phone? Quite a bit, not gonna.

Give you a number well what I mean what is quite a bit for blackberry, I, don't know we still we're still a three billion dollar company, and we have over three billion dollars of cash right now, so we're pouring most of them in research and development, because we want a new platform so but I agree with Stephanie's. This is not about getting another well-known, you know, figures to uses and then come to. Finally, for a Kanye selfie, yes, exactly well, selfie I could hand anyway. Why now and the reason why now isn't because I'm saying Android isn't a good idea, maybe it's a great idea, but there are people like I, say: users, customers and the shareholders who want to know why you didn't do this before well. I just got here, I mean well a couple of years ago, yeah a couple of years almost to the day.

In fact, right, yeah, November, 4th so well. Yesterday was my two-year anniversary, but it takes time it takes time to develop the partnership. Take time to vary technology. Could you have done it before in one way from a technological point of view? Yes, absolutely you could have done it before, but you know again, you know putting a product like this together marrying the best of two worlds. You know everything we know about security, it's all our back-end system.

You know we have a pretty interesting dashboard in here to tell you who's pinging you, for example. So those are all things that we put in it takes time to do you say it takes time? How much time do you need, because we're living in an environment where the public shareholders are very impatient? How much time do you need to make this really I told everybody two years ago that it would take me three years so one more year, I'm 230 into this all right. If it's a go ahead in success, how does this new product relate to the rest of your business? Because you mentioned you have a big business. That's apart from cell phones. Okay, practically! Is it the idea that if I go and buy one of these, it's more likely I'll use your other products? How does that connection so, so back to the earlier conversation about you know, enterprises and government using our phones, and they use our phone more securely because also because our software, the servers like for example, that you know our Department of Defense, uses our servers and to manage all devices but happen to be all BlackBerry device.

But you know that's one of those situations, so it doesn't. It doesn't really have to, but if you want to really take the highest level of security and privacy, then you should marry the two together John here's what some of those enterprise and government customers are wondering if this phone this device, the one that you've got in your hand the prison treat your expectations. What happens to BlackBerry's handset business? Well, we will then migrate more to more in his software, but when I mentioned software, everybody thought I'm, building this big mainframe type software and service software I'm talking about also soft radicals in the phone. So you know if we don't get at a good hardware, business going like making money and all that good stuff, then we'll be more constituted in software science. But will you get out of hardware? Is that it well? The market will tell us, I mean I, never do anything, and you're giving it until when at what point do you need to make that decision now? Let me answer this way because I, don't when my marketing people go crazy, here's a realize that so far it looks like that.

We're good to be to say in our bourbon breakdown, and I've, been looking into the Bloomberg to pull out hardware revenue versus software revenue. So hardware revenue are the blue columns here, going back to 2006 peaking there in 2011 software is the yellow columns here, so I actually expected to see much bigger, yellow columns, because I know that from covering the auto industry, the automakers, especially the luxury automakers, but also GM and others, are using blackberry software. So why aren't the yellow columns bigger and are they going too good? They will have to yeah deciding the hard. As you said yourself, the market is going to decide whether hardware is the business that you stay in. You know right so I'll answer the software question to say we are now a lot of the automakers I think we're not 250 cars, so something modeled, and we got pay as they roll out the car.

So it's a royalty base. So if you think about the whole idea of charging people money when they use our software on a monthly basis, this is the reason why you should be seeing the yellow line or the orange part going up on a gradual basis. Do you have an automotive? Can you quantify it and how much of that is coming from the new wave, which is to say autonomous, driving, something that you've been looking at for at least a couple of years? We don't we don't break it all apart for obvious reasons: we don't we don't have settlements, so we, but this year we believe that we'll get about half a billion dollars in soft provisions. Half a billion dollars in the software business top of which automotive is a significant part. It's a reasonably significant.

The reason I mentioned this. You know. Matt knows this. One company in the autonomous driving industry is supplier, Mobileye trades it a hundred times forward earnings you had a significant autonomous driving software. Business I have to believe BlackBerry stock would be worth a little more than it is I.

Can I can't answer any stock question I'm, always very biased? Obviously, if you're an acquisition target, are they MobileIron? Could they be a possible acquisition target MobileIron all the way, mobile I to expense at the moment, yeah, you know, but you've been buying, probably write a software? Are you still shopping for software because, if you're going, if that yellow bar is going to grow, so we made five acquisition in the last 20 months? Some reason the most reason closes good technology and are there more coming ideal will be there will be yeah well just give. No, no I'm kicking your interest. You are you know, I. Like me, some blackberry, thank you. Yeah, it's a fun phone.

They have to say that I've been trying it for a couple of days: yeah blackberry, CEO, John, Jen, thanks for being with us.

Source : Bloomberg Markets and Finance