BlackBerry Passport puts company back on road to survival

The BlackBerry Passport has helped reverse the company's dire fortunes, according to CEO John Chen.

The unusually shaped Passport - named because of its passport-like dimensions - became BlackBerry's new flagship handset earlier this year. It was something of a return to the BlackBerrys of yesteryear, with a full QWERTY keyboard and square screen, designed to make it easier for reading emails, fiddling with spreadsheets, and the other business-related activities normally undertaken by BlackBerry wielders.

Chen says the Passport has proved a hit, and perhaps even a bigger seller than the company anticipated."I'm happy in the receptivity of the design," said Chen of the Passport, in an interview with Reuters. "I'm happy that this product is a successful product, but we did not make that many of them, so it is in limited supply almost everywhere."

Chen said that he anticipated BlackBerry would make fewer handsets in the future, concentrating on a handful of core devices rather than attempting to follow the latest smartphone industry trends as the company did in the past. "I'm not going to build a general purpose device, simply because it is a 5in touchscreen," he said. "The Chinese can build one for 75 bucks, I can't get enough parts together for 75 bucks."

Brighter future

BlackBerry announced an operating profit from its handset business for the first time in five quarters earlier this year, after a period of heavy losses.

Now, Chen says he's confident the company has weathered the worst of the storm. "We will survive as a company and now I am rather confident," he said.

"We're managing the supply chain, we are managing inventories, we are managing cash, and we have expenses now at a number that is very manageable. BlackBerry has survived; now we have to start looking at growth."

BlackBerry, once the dominant smartphone maker, is almost restarting from scratch. Figures published by Strategy Analytics earlier this year gave BlackBerry a mere 0.6 percent share of the global mobile operating systems market, down from 2.4 percent in 2013. Android accounted for 85 percent of the market.

This article originally appeared at pcpro.co.uk