BlackBerry has entered the second stage of its rebuilding plan, CEO Thorsten Heins told a testy group of investors today, who demanded more details on how the smartphone firm could do better in the U.S.
At the company's annual general meeting, Heins painted BlackBerry as a "leading secure mobile computing platform for a variety of endpoints. For smartphones, but also cars, or machine to machine," according to a liveblog of the AGM from Canada's Financial Post.
BlackBerry's hardware line is just beginning to fill out; the company will have six devices out per market at a time, including one more BlackBerry 7 phone coming out later this year, according to the liveblog.
But when the investor Q&A came around, all everyone wanted to know was whether the company was breaking up and why it was doing so badly in the U.S.
On June 28, BlackBerry reported a loss for the first quarter, saying it had shipped 2.7 million smartphones running its new BlackBerry 10 OS. According to comScore's most recent U.S. market share numbers, BlackBerry's market share continued to slip between January and April from 5.9 to 5.1 percent.
The BlackBerry Z10's U.S. launch was "a disaster," investor Richard Peltier said, and Heins said the company learned "many lessons" from it.
"I have to say, from my personal experience visiting a lot of countries, it is a challenge in the U.S. And we will take this challenge on. We will look hard to resolve it," Heins said.
Not only is the U.S. a "very very competitive market," it's tough to make BlackBerry's case with U.S. carriers, Heins said. He said one major U.S. carrier sold 6 million smartphones last quarter, with 5.2 million being iPhones. (That's AT&T.)
"It's hard to convince them to go, not where the pack is, but to where the pack is going to be," he said, according to the liveblog.
He also said the carriers were why U.S. BlackBerry owners get OS updates later than Canadian BlackBerry owners. Carriers still need to be educated about which BlackBerry updates won't affect their networks, he said.
"We have to go through the carriers and the carrier testing process We're all aware that we need to change this process to really speed it up," he said, according to the liveblog.
And the U.S., obviously, isn't BlackBerry's only market. Heins cited Venezuela, Nigeria, and India as three potential core markets, and counseled patience as the company continues to rebuild.
"It is a rocky road, there's no guarantee for success, ladies and gentleman. Let's be clear about that. But I know it's a fantastic opportunity," he said.
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