BlackBerry’s future is still unclear, Christine Poole says

In a few short years, BlackBerry (BlackBerry Stock Quote, Chart TSX, NYSE:BB) has done well in steering itself away from the handset market and into the realm of software and security, but Christine Poole of GlobeInvest Capital thinks the company’s path ahead remains a little murky, especially when it comes to revenue growth.

“We don’t own BlackBerry and we’re not looking to add it,” says Poole, CEO and Managing Director of GlobeInvest Capital, to BNN Bloomberg. “I think that the CEO has made good moves to transition from hardware into software, but I think going forward there’s still not a lot of visibility about how they’re going to grow their top line.”

“The company is indicating that they can make some acquisitions and try that, but there’s just not a lot of clarity,” she says. “And I think with the general pullback in a lot of technology stocks in the [United States] that there are better opportunities where you have that better visibility in terms of top line and bottom line growth.”

After a rosy 2017, this year has been rough on BlackBerry’s share price, which currently sits 41 per cent off an early January high. The stock has lost 29 per cent of its value since the start of October when tech stocks across the board began to falter.

BlackBerry CEO John Chen has recently saidd that now with the company’s turnaround in the rearview mirror, the company is now entering a building stage.

“We came from a background where we wanted to stabilize —and we did. We wanted to set a direction and we did,” Chen said to CNBC recently. “Now, we have to focus on a growth mindset.”

Last month, BB made a big acquisition in scooping up cybersecurity firm Cylance for $1.4 billion, BlackBerry’s largest acquisition to date.

Ahead of BlackBerry’s third quarter fiscal 2019 financials due next week, investors may be hoping for a repeat of its second quarter when the company reported a profit of US$43 million, a big increase over the previous year when BB posted a net loss of US$60 million, and enough to cause the stock to jump 12 per cent as a result. At the same time, BlackBerry’s revenue of US$210 million represented a 12 per cent decline over the previous year.