Struggling smartphone maker BlackBerry has released a public message to assure its users that they can still “count” on the brand.
The announcement comes as reports have emerged that the smartphone maker is up for sale.
The likes of Reuters has reported that BlackBerry has been in talks with Cisco Systems, Google and even software firm SAP about selling all or parts of its business.
Meanwhile, other reports have suggested that BlackBerry’s co-founders Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin are considering buying the struggling smartphone maker.
BlackBerry’s demise comes amid shrinking market share and poor financial performance.
According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) BlackBerry’s share of the global smartphone market is predicted to be at 2.7% for 2013 reaching 1.7% in 2017.
This signals a sharp decline for the smartphone maker, which previously held 20% of the global smartphone market in 2009, according to the IDC and Gartner.
In Africa, BlackBerry has a 17.8% share of the smartphone market, according to the IDC. But Samsung has come to dominate the African smartphone landscape, with a 52.1% share of this market on the continent.
Meanwhile, BlackBerry this year also reported a quarterly loss of nearly $1 billion, while revenue fell 45% from a year earlier to $1.6 billion.
But in an open letter, BlackBerry has tried to assure its customers that they can continue to trust it to hold up.
“We have substantial cash on hand and a balance sheet that is debt free. We are restructuring with a goal to cut our expenses by 50% in order to run a very efficient, customer-oriented organisation,” reads the letter.
It continues, “These are no doubt challenging times for us and we don’t underestimate the situation or ignore the challenges we are facing. We are making the difficult changes necessary to strengthen BlackBerry.”
“You trust your BlackBerry to deliver your most important messages, so trust us when we deliver one of our own. You can continue to count on us,” the letter concludes.
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