Boston, MA 01/21/2014 (wallstreetpr) – BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) called Chief Executive Officer John Chen’s former colleague, Eric Johnson to help them reestablish customers’ faith. Johnson was appointed as the smartphone maker’s top sales executive.
Johnson was a senior vice president at SAP AG (ADR) (NYSE:SAP) and was looked after the company’s global technology and database. Earlier, he had joined SAP with BlackBerry’s formal CEO when their former company Sybase Inc was acquired by SAP in 2010. Chen is on the roads to bringing back his team together once again which had helped him change Sybase’s fortunes. He aims at repeating the game at BlackBerry after it has lost market to Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Samsung Electronics Co.
Chen’s former team
Earlier, in his pursuit, Chen was seen hiring another Sybase executive, Mark Wilson, who was handed over the marketing lead position in December. John Sims is another SAP executive Chen had called upon to manage the enterprise business in BlackBerry. Chen believes that the experience which the team has of working together will lead to an accelerated reform in the company. He is confident that soon the changes will be reflected in the market.
Analysts however are still unsure of the outcome that Chen forecasts. Ittai Kirdon, an analayst at Oppenheimer & Co. sees Chen’s solutions as practical but is unsure of his success in business turnaround.
BlackBerry’s outsourced manufacturing
Last month Chen announced his plans to outsource production and design of BlackBerry to Foxconn Technology Group. The two have come on settlement for a five year deal. Foxconn, the world’s largest producer of electronic products, will manufacture devices for BlackBerry in its Indonesia and Mexico plants. It will also handle the company’s quality assurance and BlackBerry will own all of its intellectual property. The company could expect to keep costs in check with this move. The smartphone maker did not fail to impress analysts with this decision.
