BlackBerry winning in cybersecurity after losing the smartphone battle
In September 2016, everything may have appeared gloomy for the BlackBerry company as it announced it will no longer develop mobile phones hardware. Then the company’s move in 2022, to decommission its once-most-popular-among-business leaders legacy phone software may have looked like the nail to the company’s coffin. But that was far from the case. The company’s smartphone business may have failed, but BlackBerry successfully pivoted from a fading smartphone legacy to security and embedded software business as its new strength.
The story of BlackBerry is a textbook example of a company making a crucial, last-ditch pivot to survive the shifts of the tech industry. According to the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX), BlackBerry Limited’s market capitalisation is approximately $2.8 billion as of October 2025.
Once the king of the smartphone world, BlackBerry (formerly Research In Motion, or RIM) faced an existential crisis by the early 2010s as the consumer-focused ecosystems of Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android completely decimated its market share.
As Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android ecosystem surged, BlackBerry struggled to adapt to the era of touchscreens and app-driven user experiences, and by the mid-2010s, its hardware business had all but collapsed.
In 2016, the company made a decisive move where it exited smartphone manufacturing to focus exclusively on software, particularly enterprise security and the emerging Internet of Things (IoT).
The critical turning point was 2013 to 2016 when the company’s survival hinged on a complete rejection of its fading hardware legacy, a pivot spearheaded by John Chen, CEO of Blackberry, who took the reins in 2013.
Chen recognised that trying to compete in the mass-market smartphone space was a losing battle, and he needed to leverage BlackBerry’s one enduring strength: security and enterprise experience.
Read also: BlackBerry discontinues services for Classic devices
The final and definitive step was taken in September 2016 when BlackBerry announced that it would end all internal hardware development. They would no longer design or manufacture phones themselves, but they would outsource the brand and device production to third-party partners.
The shift was to stop losing money on phones and double down on software where the margins were strong.
The seeds of the software company were actually planted years earlier with the 2010 acquisition of QNX Software Systems. The acquisition which gave BlackBerry a highly stable, real-time operating system (RTOS) designed for mission-critical applications which is a hidden asset.
Today, QNX is the undisputed heavyweight in the Internet of Things (IoT), particularly in the automotive industry. It serves as the foundational, secure software for millions of vehicles, powering Infotainment systems, Digital instrument clusters, Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS).
This segment now represents a major, high-value source of recurring revenue for the company.
Blackberry had an aggressive push into the Cybersecurity market by leveraging the trust they had built with government and regulated industries.
BlackBerry focused on protecting the modern digital workplace.
A key move in this strategy was the 2018 acquisition of Cylance, an AI-powered endpoint security company. This instantly elevated BlackBerry into the realm of modern threat detection and prevention.
Today, the company’s cybersecurity division offers two main categories of high-assurance software, which are Unified Endpoint Management (UEM), where solutions such as BlackBerry UEM help businesses securely manage and control every device (mobile, laptop, and so on) accessing their network.
It also has the AI-Powered threat protection using technology from the Cylance acquisition to stop advanced cyberattacks.
The final transition was the pivot, which was completed by January 2022, when the company officially decommissioned the legacy software services for the classic BlackBerry phones.
The hardware that made them an icon finally rested as BlackBerry stopped selling a device that people put in their pocket and started selling the secure operating system for the car they drive and the secure software that protects the data on the device in their pockets.
The turnaround successfully transformed a defunct hardware manufacturer into a profitable enterprise software vendor with a strong presence in two critical, high-growth sectors, which are Cybersecurity and Automotive IoT.
