Case Study of The Rise and Fall of BlackBerry

What this meant was that the technological company was on the rise. However, in 2013, the most hyped high-tech firm began facing its fall. Much of this fall can be linked to the leadership rift between Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie. BlackBerry underwent the loss of several prime figures in its management, in its course to revive its market share. In the year 2012, co-CEO, Jim Balsillie quit the board of directors. Chen was appointed the new CEO. His strategy was to sub-contract all the manufacturing to Foxconn, and to let the company completely concentrate on software technology. Initially a principal inventive firm in the smartphone market for government use and business, with about 43% in US market share in the year 2010, the firm’s dominance in the United States smartphone market declined impulsively, in section as a result of extreme competition majorly from the then US market share of Google’s Android brands and the lower share that Apple’s iPhone had in the tech-market (Sweeny, 2013).

As a result of the tight competition, the firm’s share within the US individual clientele market was lowered to about 3. 8% by the year 2013 (McNish & Silcoff, 2016). Thorsten Heins, the CEO chose to kill the notion as a result of the stress from Mike Lazaridis (Sweeny, 2013). As it appeared, Mike Lazaridis opposed the launching of Blackberry’s touchscreen phone, the Blackberry Z10. Problem Statement-Innovative Competition BlackBerry was facing significant innovative competition and this was highly contributing to its fall. In the year 2007, Apple Company introduced the iPhone. As per Mike Lazaridis, it apple phone resembled an Apple Mac computer fixed into a cellphone. It is in record that on June, the year 2007, Verizon directors asked RIM if they could develop an “iPhone Killer”.

In addition, Verizon agreed to back the United States’ launch with a big marketing campaign. The developed product was BlackBerry Storm which hit the tech-market even before the Thanksgiving in the year 2008. It was RIM’s immediate touchscreen device and was hard to operate. The devices had one processor and were much buggy and slow (Sweeny, 2013). The Developers at RIM proceeded to go through challenges with assimilating the tablet’s system with the smartphones, as both of them had a dissimilar operating system. This ended up delaying the launch of RIM’s PlayBook (Sweeny, 2013). The tablet system proved to be “an obdurate accessory” to RIM’s smartphones, and lacked contacts, e-mail and applications. Problem Statement- Google making its Android OS free The decision of Google to make Android operating system available to its users for free was a major game changer.

BlackBerry could not drop its product prices in order to keep the market share it was dropping to Android (BlackBerry Limited: Does it have a future in the consumer market. Nevertheless, the financial crisis might be accountable for that particular fall. Also, it appears that the year 2011was a critical year depicting the start of the end for BlackBerry’s good times. Chart a: Share price from year 2001 to year 2014 Strategy and Industry Analysis BlackBerry, a phone handset that was designed and promoted by RIM was one of the prime giants in the smartphone industry controlling the market share for a very long period. Previous RIM co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie introduced BlackBerry as the authorized device for powered businessmen, as vital as the pinstriped suit (BlackBerry Limited: Does it have a future in the consumer market.

In the late 2007, the introduction of BlackBerry 8800 series produced more than 10 million subscribers all over the world which surpassed the company’s all time highest record worth 49 Billion Euros; the firm was reported to be one of the most valued firms in Canada (Fu, Keene & Bloomberg News (Firm). In response to its fiscal downfall, the company fruitfully reduced its costs in the years 2014 and 2015—thereby growing its Gross Profit (Kimball, 2017). In spite of this temporary achievement, BlackBerry has been a subject to matchless adverse profit gaps and has beneficially underachieved in relation to the TMT industry (BlackBerry Limited: Does it have a future in the consumer market. Adequate liquidity to shield the short term debit for instance a secure WCR but a low money conversion in addition to a deleterious Cash Flow from investing made it difficult for the company to easily respond to expected market activities and possible investment prospects in the future.