BlackBerry logo
| credits: landoftechnology.com
| credits: landoftechnology.com
BlackBerry is considering spinning off its popular messaging service BBM to form a new company, reports claim.
The troubled Ontario-based smartphone
maker is considering options for its future, including a break-up or
sale, but has already confirmed that the popular BlackBerry Messenger
service will launch on rival platforms such as Apple’s iOS and Google
Android later this summer.
Spinning it off completely, as the WSJ
suggests, would allow the new business to operate with greater
independence, but it would also pitch it against much larger services
such as Skype, owned by Microsoft, standalone messaging apps such as
WhatsApp and increasingly popular in-house options owned by other
manufacturers, including Samsung’s ChatOn.
BBM is widely perceived as BlackBerry’s
most valuable asset aside from its corporate email, BlackBerry
Enterprise Server. The company is thought to be keen to position some of
its services as particularly valuable in advance of any restructuring.
Although BBM retains a loyal core of users, its 60m users are already
dwarved by the 200m people who use the WhatsApp service, which currently
works across platforms, and has replaced text messages for many of its
young users.
“We have announced our plans to offer
this trusted mobile messaging service to iPhone and Android users
sometime this summer,” a BlackBerry spokesman said. “We have made no
further announcements.”
BlackBerry has dithered over what to do
with BBM for as long as three years, it has been claimed, with some
executives seeing the messaging service as a unique selling point for
the company’s own phones, while others argued that it would only decline
if it was not made available more widely on more popular platforms. The
announcement this year that the service would finally come to Android
and iOS was pitched as a sign of BlackBerry’s confidence that users
would value the service over others on phones made by rival
manufacturers.
Since BlackBerry’s decision to form a
sub-committee examining how it might sell or spin-off some elements, the
company’s share price has fallen by almost a third to around $10.
-telegraph.co.uk
0 Comments