1.0 Executive Summary

1.1 History of

In 1984, founded an electronics and science consulting company called

Research In Motion (RIM). For years the company focused on a breakthrough technology, which they called it as the ―BlackBerry‖. It is an easy, secure, and effective device that allowed users to send and receive e-mails while away from the office. Since email had become so popular, people who were on the go needed a way to access their email without having to find a computer.

RIM grew into one of the world‘s most valuable tech companies. The BlackBerry became the indispensable accessory of business executives, heads of state, and Hollywood celebrities. The first

BlackBerry smart phone was developed in 2003 and in a remarkably short time, they have managed to completely change the way that people communicate. This was a device that not only functioned as a telephone but also allowed for the sending or receiving of email and text messages as well as web browsing. RIM‘s BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) instant messaging service is once popular before. The plan of BBM was to push wireless carriers to adopt as a replacement for their short text messaging system

(SMS) applications.

1.2 Current competitive position

Since the introduction of the BlackBerry, there was a lot of competitors have appeared on the market and now they are competing with some of the biggest companies in the telecommunications industry. This competition combined with improving technology has resulted in a huge increase in the number of functions that you will find on your BlackBerry. Apple and Samsung are over taking blackberry rapidly.

The company neither anticipated nor responded quickly to the threats posed by Android and the iPhone.

BlackBerry was focused on efficiency, keyboards and security while Apple devoted its attention to broadly appealing concepts like performance and ease of use. Despite having an initial edge in the corporate world, BlackBerry was facing a difficult battle when trying to influence wider audience that did not care about encrypted email or network bandwidth. BlackBerry did not start revamping its (OS) until it bought QNX in 2010, see appendix 2 to learn more on the blackberry timeline. By then, this has already given both Apple and a huge opportunity to build up their market share and they sometimes did so in ways that BlackBerry had not expected. Blackberry did not just lose its tentative grip on the mainstream for market but also slow to acknowledge the ―Bring Your Own

Device‖ trend, which saw workers replace company-issued BlackBerrys with personal .

2.0 External Analysis

2.1 Political

Corporate and government clients were the faithful and reliable backbone to BlackBerry‘s business model, because they would sign multi-year agreements for its enterprise services, known as Blackberry

Enterprise Server (BES). They are highly sensitive towards data control and security which banks and US government will likely to invest on RIM. So far Blackberry has been the only and the preferred smartphone of choice for the White House including President Barack Obama.

However, some countries like China, India and UAE are politically against RIM, they raised their concerns over the security features of Blackberry devices as these countries‘ governments cannot access to the database of users to track some people especially terrorist suspects‘ activities. Another major political concern is that some European countries have imposed stricter regulation regarding to hygiene and safety stands for manufactures which could impact the operation of RIM as they faces pressure from the usage of toxic contents, energy usage and recycling.

2.2 Economic

Economic factors play a key role in the smart phone industry as demand is fairly elastic and it is mostly based on consumer income. With the fairly stable pace of economy in the developing countries like

China, India and South East Asia countries, people are likely to be able to afford on new advanced smartphone. Since the sales of blackberry are made throughout the world, the exchange rates will also have an impact on RIM as the fluctuation in exchange rates can slowly make Blackberry competitive. On the other hand, after the financial crisis in 2008, many countries‘ government adopt the east quantitative financial policy to introduce low interest rate to stir the economy and encourage domestic consumption.

2.3 Social

For younger generations, smartphones are necessities. Studies showed that about 78% of teens now have a cell phone, and almost half (47%) of those own smartphones (Madden and Lenhart et al., 2013). Social networking sites like Facebook can be addictive, and mobile devices are invaluable to the growing number of daily commuters. Accordingly, smartphone makers are integrating dozens of new services into each new model to keep users staring at their screens. Younger generations seem focused on technology and are willing to pay a higher price regardless of their income. Moreover, people think that newest smartphones symbolize high status. As the needs for more functions of mobile phone increase, the smartphone market driven by the social factors also increase significantly.

2.4 Technology

As the growing dependence on mobile devices for entertainment, communication, social networking and other uses will likely tax networks with increased data traffic, making the challenge of expanding airwaves for carriers more acute. The industry has slowly expanded its allocation of spectrum and is boosting high-speed service as a whole.

Technological advances over the past decade like 3G, new camera-flash and fingerprint scanning technology, and improving battery life of the phone has had an impact on RIM. Additionally, the ever- changing competition in the market is competing on the software offering of the product. On the other hand, consumers tend to prefer user-friendlier and personalize phones.

3.0 Internal Analysis

3.1 Strength

Blackberry is the only platform approved for use in national security agencies and is the number 1 choice for enterprises and government. Blackberry is a very secure mobile phone with encrypted network that allowed sending emails between phones without possibility of stealing the information. This has become the unique selling proposition of and was a very attractive feature for corporates and governments that other phones didn‘t have. With the current treat of terrorist, a security operation system is highly essential for some company and organizations. Additionally, Blackberry has pretty strong focus on their narrow customer target audience, they will be able to be more focus on the approach of satisfying the needs of this narrow segment and for this case, Blackberry‘s target audience are mainly cooperate and governments.

The second strength of blackberry is that it has its own self-developed operation system that can minimize the risk of patent. For example, if Google stop providing license rights to produce LG Android phone. LG will be at risk as they are heavily depending on Google‘s Android system.

3.2 Weakness

One major weakness of Blackberry is that they are highly dependent on government and corporate contracts. Although Blackberry offers the most secured phones among the markets to governments and corporate, but it does not guaranteed to receive long- term contracts from government and corporate. If there is a loss of one contract, it can directly impacted blackberry badly.

Another factor, is that Blackberry is launched to the market with an impression of an business oriented phone, for instants with QWERTY keyboards and with business software and apps which many people classified them as boring and it does not catch the attention of the consumers in the market or even finds that the keyboard and screen are too small. They won‘t be able to rival their competition of IOS or

Android in terms of apps market, as more popular apps are available in competitor‘s software market.

3.3 Opportunity

Research showed 34% of American adults ages 18 and older own a tablet computer like an iPad,

Samsung Galaxy Tab, Google Nexus, or Kindle Fire—almost twice as many as the 18% who owned a tablet a year ago (Zickuhr, 2013). Professors predict that tablet market would expect to grow by 50% annually from 2011 to 2015. And according to this statistics, Blackberry will have a great opportunity to strengthen its position in the fast growing market and capture a small portion of the market share.

Besides entering to the tablet market, the key competitive advantage in technology sector is strong patent portfolio. Blackberry should get this chance to discover its patents by engaging in costly R&D or through acquisitions of other firms. News even reported that BlackBerry's patents could be worth $5bn if it finds a single buyer (Liam Tung, 2013).

3.4 Threat

One of the most severe threats that BlackBerry faced and similarly, with the other tech companies are rapid technological change. Companies are under the pressure to release new products faster and faster to meet the consumers‘ needs and also to remain competitive with their rivals. This is especially hard when a company wants to introduce something new, innovative and successful.

Not only that, there is also an increased competition for government contracts. Government renews its contracts with suppliers every few years and BlackBerry has to compete with such formidable players as

Samsung and Apple for contract renewal. Although BlackBerry has an advantage over competitors in providing highly secure mobile devices, however it has to compete on other phone features, which the company competes poorly. BlackBerry has already been outcompeted by Samsung on renewing some of

US government contracts last year.

4.0 Problem Statement

One of the key issues that Blackberry faced is failing to meet the market demand. It has strongly shaken the current market position of Blackberry in the smartphones industry since the new entries of and Samsung in Year 2009 & 2011 respectively. With these upcoming threats, Blackberry did not innovate its technology to improve the product function and design. Although Blackberry tried to come up with a new touch screen smartphone, it is still not good enough to catch the attraction of the consumers. According to Porter‘s 5 forces, the intensity of rivalry for Blackberry is relatively high with the presence of both iPhone and Samsung in the market. Their innovative technology in smartphone industry grows rapidly and the brand recognition for both companies is pretty strong. Other competitors like LG, TLC, etc. are also entering into the market with similar upgraded technology, together with tablets deliberately. BlackBerry‘s phones gradually get out-dated and unattractive.

On the other hand, Blackberry has not gathered much of their customers‘ loyalty. Blackberry was well known to be famous for business phones, while we have seen that they have neglected other larger quantity of well-heeled, tech-hungry consumers. Those buyers are desired for a multifunction phone that combined with entertainment, business usage and life direction. More and more consumers quit the contract with Blackberry after the launch of iPhone and Android. iPhone and Android open the door for larger group of users (Hicks, 2012). Under the threats of those consumer-oriented smart phones,

Blackberry cannot catch the steps of its competitors when it has to run on third-party application, together with unattractive design. Hence, it has loss a large number of consumers (The Associated Press, 2012).

Furthermore, the poor leadership of the co CEOs - and Mike Lazaridis had lead to a downfall of Blackberry as they never took Apple‘s iPhone as a serious threat to business. They were unable to provide strong executive decisions, lacklustre innovation, unkept promises in delivering new products, and a lack of understanding that its part of the tech industry was undergoing a fundamental shift, according to the BBC (Computerweekly.com, 2014). Although it may be too late, the new CEO of

Blackberry, Thorsten Heins sees the need to change urgently and needs to focus on their software.

Poor leadership can also lead to low morale, bad employee retention, and unsustainable long-term success. Corporate culture becomes a meaningless term where leaders claim it exists while employees shake their heads in frustration. There is a lack of clear, consistent communication from leadership to the employees. As a result, employees are uncertain of the company‘s goals and objectives for success and they have no idea how they fit into that picture, and they decided to leave the company (Hicks, 2012).

Human resource is one of the core powers for company development, therefore having a good leader is very important to lead and inspire people.

5.0 Strategic Alternatives

Before choosing which strategy to solve their problems, Blackberry firstly had to consider about what kind of resources should be obtained. Financial resource is one of the key resources where Blackberry is lacking of for technology improvement. In 2012, the company had only 1.4 billion US dollars for R&D, which is far beyond Apple and Google. ―Blackberry market share has collapsed in the US, it has just suffered its third successive quarter of losses (and forecast at least one more)‖, said Arthur (2012). The revenues fell and the general trend is showing downward. There is not enough capital for developing other new product, so the handsets and tablets shipments are dropping (Arthur, 2012).

Besides for financial resources, brand recognition are also essential for evaluating strategies. Blackberry had already loss its consumer loyalty and its new product like BB10 is also not accepted by most of the consumers. The first impression that Blackberry gives to the majority is that Blackberry is specialise only for company usage. However, more business users accept the value of IOS rather than Blackberry. Brand consultant Bruce Philp says: ―one big problem with Blackberry‘s brand is that they never contemplated competition‖ (Beer, 2011). It has repeated a mistake that aiming at distribution rather than product attribution. The negative side of word of mouth about quality problems do affect its image as well (Beer,

2011).

The next important resource is its technological assets, which includes patents, copyright, production technology and technologies that support for business actives (Gamble, et al., 2013, p.72). Blackberry does have some technology of its own likely still growing in value. Blackberry subsidiary Certicom owns patents crucial to using a form of encryption that the US and other governments say is the best way to protect sensitive data, and should replace the methods relied on to secure the Internet today (MIT

Technology Review, 2014).

6.0 Evaluation

Business environments are highly uncertain. According to Preston (2001), innovation and flexibility are key determinants of a company‘s success. Blackberry, once considered as Smartphone pioneer has lost its customer‘s appeal, struggling with losses and dwindling user base as entrants launched innovative that further revolutionized Smartphone. There is always a need to look at strategic alternatives to enhance its values and escape from its current malaise.

6.1 Strategic Alternatives (1)

Blackberry may review possibility of partnership with technologies companies as part of wider strategy to help its battle for survival in highly competitive Smartphone market. Blackberry has developed and manufactured software and devices in-house and internal production consume wealth of resources and expertise. Entering into partnership enables establishment of efficient business model, and allow

Blackberry to focus heavily on what they do best on internal development while simultaneously addressing fast growing market by leveraging its partner‘s scale, essential expertise, capabilities and resources. Moreover, Blackberry can consider selling their strong and reputable operating system (OS) which emphasizes on security to smartphone markers who are struggling in fragmented market and trying to differentiate themselves from other Android phones like Samsung. On the other hand, Blackberry can review possibility of partnering with existing OS developers, like Google Inc to develop Blackberry devices running Android OS. Blackberry OS have seen as major loss in market share and not up to par with the competitors, leading some users moving on to greener pastures. It could be beneficial for the company to direct its relatively limited resources towards specific problem rather than several attempts to develop a full-blown OS. If Blackberry could introduce a messaging centric Android phone with solid- build quality featuring highly acclaimed physical keyboards, it would create an inroad to the competitive market as well as attracting interests from the potential customers.

Partnership agreement enables the company to benefit from combination of complementary skills of two companies. There is wider pool of knowledge and skills needed for successful innovation performance.

Both parties could become more cost-effective as each partner is specialized in certain aspects on business. The relationship could provide more moral support to each other and hence boosting for more creative brainstorming. The partner‘s manufacturing plants are the most efficient way to manufacture the devices in larger scale, lower costs and as result, higher profit margins. It allows the struggling company to move its business away from its hardware manufacture to outsource risks in their business, to concentrate on what they are good at making, expanding and monetizing its software offering to build more solutions for its customers. On the other hand, Blackberry could boost the company back to serious contender in Smartphone market by allowing rivalry firms‘ platform to be operated in its devices. This move would address criticism that Blackberry does not have enough software application and lessen its struggle to persuade developers to develop apps specifically for Blackberry‘s.

However, partnership has its fallbacks too. A partnership is usually a long-term plan. The expectations, economic situation could change overtime unexpectedly which would post a risk to traumatic splits up between two companies. Diverging objectives and priorities, and inabilities to work together could make the objectives of the alliances obsolete.

6.2 Strategic Alternatives (2)

Blackberry‘s ability to provide security is legendary. It has been used by Government and corporation sectors for its excellence in enterprise and security functionality. Today, competitors are slowly creeping into niche market segment trying to overtake Blackberry‘s but still highly reliable in these markets. The most attractive asset is its intellectual property, including software and many more patents. In a market where competitors like Apple and Samsung is constantly fighting lengthy legal battle over patent disputes where patent can be used to raise massive licensing revenue, Blackberry‘s portfolio has nothing to shake a stick at. The company needs to find way to stop bleeding or risk to slipping into obscurity like what happened to Hewlett-Packard. One of the strategic alternatives that could assist the company to be back to its path of profitability is to merge or acquisition with tech-heavyweight. The potential of merger and acquisition could open-up new chapter for the company and its stakeholders, and is useful for the company to expand.

Blackberry is a listed company and by going private enables the company to avoid distraction of having managed quarterly financial results to protect its shareholder‘s interest. The relentless pressure of quarterly profit reports and conference calls with analysts foster a short-sighted fixation on the short-term results. The transition could deliver immediate values to its shareholders, while the company could focus on delivering superior and secure enterprise solutions to its worldwide customers. Blackberry, together with the tech-heavyweights, could leverage on each other expertise and resources, to do continuous improvement on hardware, software and services and to explore to other areas of business apart from its existing tablet and mobile market, to keep itself afloat and to fight back the market share. The companies that merge together have the opportunity to exchange business ideas and strategies. They can recognize in each other weakness, to work together to resolve those inefficiencies. Moreover, less negative media‘s extensive coverage could breed higher consumer‘s confidences and provides the companies with substantial gains.

However, taking company private solve only one actual problem, which is to resolve the shareholder‘s discontent with the declining value in their investment. It does not fix the fundamental problem facing by

Blackberry, which is losing ground of their market share. It only provides a breathing room for the struggling company. By merger and acquisition with other companies, the company may risk ending up wasting their resources on resolving the conflicts arising from vary of opinions and objectives. It could reduce the morale of the employees due to uncertainties occurred during the transition period. Blackberry may end up giving its competitive advantages piece-by-piece, as was the case with the personal computer makers in the 1990s and early 2000s.

6.3 Strategic Alternatives (3)

Blackberry might not be able to thrive unless it can continue to innovate. The ability to build a stronger brand in marketplace is playing critical role than ever in fiercely competitive business environment.

Smartphone‘s are Blackberry core business, its success is critical and failure is worrisome. The

Smartphone are increasingly similar and offer many of same features. According to Michael (2013), branding has becoming significantly important in IT gadget industry. Blackberry has lost its market share in industry over the past few years as the market evolved to become more consumer-driven and

Blackberry has failed to recognize the trend. The lacked of clear technological advantages on myriad

Smartphone presence in the market, a problem exacerbated by a weak OS supporting relatively few number of applications and services as compared to its competitors which has hinder its adoption rates. If

Blackberry could not win back market share with its Smartphone and tablets, it had better hope to adopting broad differentiation strategy to plays to its strength, to build a way that sneaking their products into other inventions. For example, has ventured the gaming industry following the introduction of XBOX to exemplify firm‘s implementation of robust adaptive strategies other than their

OS and computer software business which has helped them to win market share in the IT market.

Blackberry could put its best foot forward and get into warrior spirit by inviting the consumer into the future. The company needs moon shots to truly move the needle in the business by using their expertise and resources, to ship the technology to consumers and to provide its consumer with a compelling, breathtaking, and wonderful vision of the future ahead of its competitors. The company should offer something unique, outstanding, and practical to divest its portfolio as its bolster its balance sheet and turn around its fortune, at the same time to become mainstream appealing to its broader customer rather than niche market segments.

However, Blackberry has to become financially solid in order to be aggressively venture into other areas of business. To compete in other fields, the company need substantial economic of scale and large war chest, as well as tolerance of protracted losses on a bill that could take several years to recover. It would be relatively risky ventures with tremendous initial costs to start everything from scratch. The company need to be powerful than its competitors to dominate the market and create its own reputation on the new products.

7.0 Recommendation

The strategic alternatives that would bring Blackberry out from its current malaise would be broad differentiation and partnership.

In marketplace where competition is stiff because of the proliferation of similar products, a company can come up with features that differentiate their products and services from those of rivals. The features could create a perceived value and build brand loyalty among its existing and potential customers. The differentiated products and services, which focus on functionality and quality, could create a customer‘s perception that there is no substitute available on the market although the competitors might have similar products, and command for a higher prices. For example, introduction of IPhone4 is auspicious, if not necessarily extraordinary, opening up new chapter for Apple Inc in Smartphone and tablet market and has given them with a handsome profit. The product is higher than people‘s expectation and people were enthusiastic and thrilled.

Blackberry might not have sufficient resources in order to venture to other areas of business apart than their Smartphone and tablet market. As such, partnering with other IT manufacturers could help its battle in the competitive market. Something needs to happen and with the right pairing; it is possible that

BlackBerry could claw-back the market share that it has lost. Blackberry could focus on what they do best, to venture to other areas of business to address fast growing markets to allow company compete effectively. The company could ship the technology to consumers and provide compelling, breathtaking and wonderful vision of the future ahead of its competitors. For example, introduction of Google Glass is outlandish project. Blackberry could invent an interactive desktop as featuring in the fiction movie by leveraging the necessary resources from its partner. It could reduce the financial risk exposure, and giving it room to work on project pipelines in a way that will help to produce better products and services.

Partnering options could help to manage costs and design to share the financial burden. It could help to minimize the costs as the partner would have necessary resources, to improve flexibility and branching into new business and return to its innovation trait.

The amount of time takes to execute the plan can dramatically changed by the competitors. The company should see the potential and plan the future plan much earlier than others. Time and idea is important especially in technology field. What makes a great turnaround is urgency, obsessive focus on the things that matter. One of the challenges Blackberry faces with its brand building is that it needs to move away from its older images, which is a more enterprise and professional focused brand. They have to restructuring on its strategy to reengineer a new strategy to stabilize the company and prepare for the change to maximize efficiencies. The management team have to acknowledge the problem and make adjustments to turnaround the company, coupled with Blackberry existing strength, makes it viable target to interest the consumers.

8.0 Limitations

Many factors can create roadblocks to strategic planning.

8.1 Time Consuming

Strategy planning is designed to provide an organization with long-term benefits. Therefore, an analysis of internal and external environment, forecasting, interaction with officers and employees may take considerable amount of time. Sometimes, strategic planning is challenging and expensive but the desired results may take years to come about.

8.2 Failure to predict environmental reaction

The environment that organisation faces may change more than expected, including unexpected events in economics, or social issues. Strategic planning is hard work and requires imagination, innovation, analytical ability, creativity, and the resolution to evaluate, choose and design implementation strategies for organization products, relevant several years into the future. Strategic plans are commitments made in the present for alterative choices for the future. A strategic plan should be a plan whose implementation is likely to come about assuming that environmental factors remain relatively constant.

8.3 Failure to manage change

Resistance by enterprise people, the old way of doing things, old policies, old strategies, and operating processes and procedures may be so entrenched that it is difficult to change them. Formal strategic planning is not designed to get an enterprise out of current difficulties. But a strategic planning process that has considered alternative scenarios, may be both positive and negative, or even will help to reduce the effects of operational difficulties.

In conclusion, every organisation should have a strategy. Organizations should take a proactive attitude rather than a reactive approach in the industry. They should rather fight to influence, to anticipate and initiate than just respond to events. Strategic management includes this process by making decisions.

Otherwise, they won‘t be able to remain competitive within the market and resulting them to be at a losing end.

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Appendix 2: BlackBerry Timeline

1984 – Engineering students Mike Lazaridis and co-found Research in Motion 1992 – joins RIM 1996 – RIM introduces the Inter@active Pager, which allows users to send and receive messages 1999 – RIM is listed on NASDAQ and introduces the RIM 850 Wireless Handheld, a data-only QWERTY device 2002 –The BlackBerry 5810 comes out, which is the first BlackBerry phone to actually make phone calls – via a wired headset

2003 – RIM introduces the BlackBerry 7230, with a color display, integrated calling capabilities and a full web browser 2006 – RIM releases the BlackBerry Pearl, which replaced the thumb wheel with a track ball for navigation 2006 March – RIM agrees to pay $612.5 million to NTP to settle a patent dispute 2007 – The BlackBerry Curve comes out, establishing the classic BlackBerry form factor 2007 June – Apple releases the first iPhone

2008 May – The BlackBerry Bold is released 2008 October – The first Android-powered phone, the T-Mobile G1, goes on sale 2008 November – RIM introduces the BlackBerry Storm, which was received poorly 2009 – The online BlackBerry App World store opens, with noticeably fewer apps than the competition 2010 June – RIM buys QNX Software Systems 2010 August – The BlackBerry Torch comes out, which featured a sliding touchscreen and a QWERTY keyboard 2010 October – The first Windows phones go on sale 2011 August – RIM releases the BlackBerry Bold 9900, the last big push for BB7 2011 April – The QNX-powered BlackBerry Playbook tablet comes out 2011 October – A three-day service disruption affects BlackBerry users worldwide 2012 January – Co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis step down and COO Thorsten Heins takes over

2013 January – RIM changes its name to BlackBerry 2013 February – BlackBerry releases the touchscreen-only BlackBerry Z10 running the new BlackBerry 10 OS 2013 June – BlackBerry releases the keyboarded BlackBerry Q10 2013 August – BlackBerry announces that it is open to ―possible transactions,‖ including a potential sale of the company 2013 September – BlackBerry announces that it will cut 40 percent of its workforce – roughly 4,500 jobs 2013 September – BlackBerry signs letter of intent to be acquired by Fairfax Financial Holdings for $4.7 billion