With New Outsourcing Deal, BlackBerry Cancels Two Phones

Gadget - A small item from BlackBerry’s earnings-related filing Friday got lost in the news of its hardware partnership with Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology Group–sales of its new phones have been so bad that BlackBerry was forced to cancel the rollout of two not-yet-released phones.

BlackBerry’s announcement Friday that it will start outsourcing its hardware business to Foxconn was greeted with enthusiasm by investors, who pushed that stock up 15.5%. In recent trading Monday, the stock was up another 5.4%.

In the filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which detailed the weak sales of its current crop of phones, BlackBerry said it made the decision to “cancel plans to launch two devices to mitigate the identified inventory risk.” The Waterloo, Ontario-based company wrote off nearly $1 billion in unsold phone inventory in the fiscal second quarter and another $1.6 billion in the third quarter.

Those canceled phones, according to a person familiar with the matter, were internally code-named Café and Kopi, and were low-cost phones aimed at emerging markets. The timing of the launch of the phones was unclear.

Foxconn will now take over the making of low-cost phones, BlackBerry’s interim chief executive, John Chen, said Friday. The first of the phones from that partnership, nicknamed Jakarta, will be launched around April, according to Chen.

But BlackBerry is still working on several higher-end devices, internally code-named Ontario and Windermere, according to the person familiar with the matter. Its most recent higher-end devices, the Z10 and the Q10, have flopped.

Chen said last week that eventually he would prefer that Foxconn take responsibility for the hardware side of all of the company’s phones, even the high-end devices.

Kerjasama perdana BlackBerry dengan pabrikan Foxconn yang dikenal sebagai perakit iPhone dan iPad telah mengerucut pada produksi sebuah ponsel kelas menengah. Ponsel BlackBerry yang kabarnya menggunakan codename Jakarta itu akan dirilis di musim semi tahun depan atau sekitar bulan Maret-Mei 2014.

Sebelumnya dikabarkan pula bahwa BlackBerry telah menarik rencana rilis dua ponsel baru seri C dan K. Penarikan rilis dua ponsel BlackBerry tersebut tampaknya tak lepas dari kesepakatan baru yang dibuat CEO Chen dengan Foxconn. Sebagai gantinya, BlackBerry akan merilis dua ponsel high-end yang diperuntukkan bagi konsumen enterprise.

Mengenai dua ponsel BlackBerry baru kelas high-end tersebut, Wall Street Journal menyebut codename Ontario dan Windermere. Belum ada bocoran spesifikasi mengenai keduanya kecuali form factor yang mendeskripsikan salah satu adalah ponsel full touchscreen sementara satunya dilengkapi QWERTY keyboard fisik.

Dengan kata lain, 2014 akan menjadi tahun penentu bagi BlackBerry. Sebuah keputusan besar telah dibuat Chen dengan menarik dua ponsel murah yang akan dirilis tahun depan dan menggantinya dengan dua ponsel high-end dan satu ponsel kelas menengah yang rencananya akan dirilis di Indonesia, tak lepas dari nama Jakarta yang disandangnya.

Source
And Go

Ditulis Oleh : Hasan Official ~My Cellular Gadget

Sobat sedang membaca artikel tentang With New Outsourcing Deal, BlackBerry Cancels Two Phones . Oleh Admin, Sobat diperbolehkan mengcopy paste atau menyebar-luaskan artikel ini, namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link dibawah ini sebagai sumbernya <a href="http://gadgetnewsku.blogspot.com/2013/12/with-new-outsourcing-deal-blackberry.html" target="_blank">With New Outsourcing Deal, BlackBerry Cancels Two Phones </a>