Back in 2012, 24/7 Wall St.’s Douglass McIntyre wrote that in the following year, BlackBerry would fold. The prediction that BlackBerry was on its way out wasn’t terribly bold — BGR had already been reporting on the various signs that trouble was brewing in Waterloo for several years — but the time frame seemed a bit overzealous.
As expected, that prediction didn’t end up panning out.
Now, BlackBerry is considered by several industry watchers to be back on the right path. Even after a rough morning session following news of Apple’s IBM tie up, BlackBerry shares are up about 40% so far in 2014. But despite the positive sentiment and upward trend, McIntyre is back again with a new prediction: BlackBerry will fold in 2015.
“BlackBerry is about to run out of its nine lives,” McIntyre wrote in a recent post on 24/7 Wall St. “As recently as 2008, BlackBerry, then operating as Research In Motion, had 19.5% of the global smartphone market. However, following Apple’s introduction of the iPhone in 2007 and Google’s release of the Android mobile operating system in 2008, that figure fell to less than 1% by late 2013.”
He continued, “Despite the fanfare surrounding the release of two new phones last year, sales of the Z10 and Q10 were abysmal. At the end of last year, BlackBerry outsourced its hardware to Foxconn to focus on its software offerings. The company has positioned its QNX platform as the most secure operating system for mobile communication, and it is now a leading OS in the auto and health care industries. While these are attractive businesses for potential buyers, they are inadequate on their own to make the company viable.”
McIntyre went on to note that BlackBerry’s revenue plummeted in the fiscal first quarter to $966 million from $3.1 billion in the year-ago quarter, which he says helps to confirm his belief that “BlackBerry cannot survive on its own.”
