Blackberry open to licensing

At its annual shareholder meet, BlackBerry CEO Thorstein Heins revealed that he was still open to licensing deals or even an outright sale of the company reports Reuters. This appeased unhappy shareholders who were reeling from the poor performance of the stock, which was a direct result of the poor sales that the new BlackBerry 10 based smartphones had garnered. While saying this Heins also reiterated that the company was going through a transition period and they were in it for the long haul. At the same time he said “BlackBerry will pursue every opportunity to create value for the shareholders.” The main reason while the share price has plummeted is because the company sold very few BB10 smartphones in the last quarter. It’s worth noting that this was first full quarter where BB10 based smartphones were readily available. BlackBerry is not only facing stiff competition from Android and Apple’s iPhone, but even Windows Phone based smartphones have been steadily chipping away and stealing its market share. In the last two quarters BlackBerry has lost 7 million users. One of the biggest problems of the new BlackBerry 10 smartphones is the steep learning curve for navigating the user interface of the new platform and dearth of applications that users expect.