Blackberry was one of the iconic brands and had given a tough time to the competitors at the time when smartphones were close to reality but were not yet official. Slowly, things seemed to change but the stubborn-self nature of the company stuck to what it offered back then. Now, the era of Android, iOS and Windows Phone has given such a tough phase to Blackberry that the official global smartphone market share numbers show the share as zero percent.
It seemed too late for the company to release an Android smartphone, which came towards the end of 2015, while the decline of the numbers began when the first iPhone was introduced. Gartner’s data in Q3 of 2016 showed the company’s presence at 0.1% of the market with about 375000 devices sold, but now, the number got down even further and these numbers are collective of both, the ones with Blackberry OS and the Android OS.
In the fourth quarter of 2016, about 431 million smartphones were sold in the entire market and of which, the ones running Blackberry’s own OS were about 207,900. Even if it cannot be called 0%, the percentage of 0.0482% can give an indication of the position of the company.
According to Gartner, the stats don’t include the Android phone sales, i.e. of the Blackberry Priv, DTEK50 and DTEK60, but it is said that the numbers aren’t encouraging anyway, which will be known after the end of Q1 2017. In September 2016, the company had announced that it will no longer make its own phones but will rely on third party phone makers to manufacture Blackberry-branded phones.
The Senior Vice President for global device sales at Blackberry had mentioned that the Blackberry 10 OS is not dead and it is still preferred by consumers in specific markets and in enterprise and government segment as well. Blackberry will keep investing and working on the BB10 OS, but looking at the numbers, it seems that the company isn’t doing financially well and thus is the decision to approach third-party phone makers for its phones.
