BlackBerry is hitting new lows in quarterly sales; most recently, it reported only 600,000 phones sold in its fourth quarter, which ended on Feb. 29.Mark Blinch/Reuters
BlackBerry Ltd. has put a 30-year veteran of Motorola Inc. in charge of its devices division in the latest executive shuffle of the Waterloo, Ont., company.
Outgoing president of devices Ron Louks was one of chief executive officer John Chen's early hires: Mr. Chen became interim CEO of BlackBerry in November, 2013, and brought in Mr. Louks in January, 2014. Mr. Louks was a veteran of the handset industry and had been a chief strategy officer for HTC America Inc. and a chief technology officer of Sony Ericsson.
Under Mr. Louks, the company released six phones, although he can be said to have overseen only four: the Passport (2014), Classic (2014), Leap (2015) and Priv (2015).
The new head of devices has an even longer hardware track record: Ralph Pini spent 28 years at Motorola before he left in 2004 and was once chief technology officer of its Mobile Cellular Group. "I was a critical member of the team behind many Motorola products, including Razr, I have extensive knowledge of product design and customer needs," Mr. Pini wrote in a Q&A BlackBerry posted on its blog.
Mr. Pini takes over at a tough time for the global smartphone industry. Reports from IDC and Strategy Analytics suggest shipments flat lined at around 334 million devices in the first quarter of 2016, and may have actually fallen for the first time in a decade.
Meanwhile, BlackBerry is hitting new lows in quarterly sales; most recently, it reported only 600,000 phones sold in its fourth quarter, which ended on Feb. 29. It has been six months since the launch of the latest BlackBerry handset, the premium-priced Android-powered Priv.
In April, Mr. Chen acknowledged that the Priv had been priced too high (it started at around $700 to $800 without a contract subsidy): "Softness in the high end of the smartphone market is a headwind," he said. "That [price] segment appears to be quite saturated."
Despite widespread calls by analysts for Mr. Chen to abandon the hardware game, he has indicated that BlackBerry will release two modestly priced handsets in the current fiscal year. They are expected to be built on a customized version of Google's Android operating system the company has modified to approximate the security available on its BB10 operating system. The last new BB10 device, the touch-screen Leap, was released in April, 2015.
BlackBerry sold about 3.2 million devices in its 2016 fiscal year, compared with seven million in fiscal year 2015.
BlackBerry did not make Mr. Pini available for comment, but he did write in the blog post that his focus will include "expanding distribution beyond BlackBerry's traditional channels."
Mr. Pini has an interesting connection to Canadian corporate history: Toward the end of his career with Motorola, he worked with then president and chief operating officer Mike Zafirovski to turn around the phone division. When former CEO Chris Galvin was ousted in 2003, Mr. Zafirovski was passed over for the job in favour of Ed Zander. Even though the crowning achievement of their collaboration, the Motorola Razr, was launched in late 2004, both men left the company in the months following. Mr. Pini left in late 2004 to teach at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Mr. Zafirovski came to Canada to be the CEO of Nortel Networks in early 2005.
Mr. Pini came to BlackBerry via his job as CEO of Paratek Microwave Inc., a radio technology company that BlackBerry bought in 2012. That same year, Google Inc. bought Motorola, only to break it up for parts and sell the smartphone division to China's Lenovo Group Ltd. in 2014.
BlackBerry shares have been trending downward since March 7, when the stock reached a three-month high of $10.95.
Shane Dingman