We’re turning BlackBerry around, new CEO says

It started 2024 trading at twenty-year low, but BlackBerry’s (BlackBerry Stock Quote, Chart, News, Analysts, Financials TSX:BB) new CEO says things are looking up.

On a conference call around the RBC Global Technology, Internet, Media and Telecommunications Conference on November 19, CEO John Giamatteo, who took the reins of the company in December of 2023, took a question from the audience about what he hopes will happen over the next year. He painted a picture of a company in distress at the time he took over.

“Well, as you heard, the common theme is a year ago, revenue was declining,” he said. “We were unprofitable, and we were burning cash. 12 months ago, if we were sitting here, that was the BlackBerry story. A year later, revenue is now kind of stabilized. Some pockets of it have grown. We’re on the verge of breaking through to our profitability standpoint. And in Q4, we’re confident we’ll be at a cash flow positive. So, in one year, we kind of stabilized the company in a lot of ways. As we go into that next year, growth acceleration by pivoting our investment on areas where we absolutely think we can grow, continuing to get leverage out of our business model and drive more profitability. And, we think by taking care of our Cylance drag, that’ll be, in one fell swoop, that’ll take us to another level where, to Tim’s point, a year ago, we were not thinking about what would we do with cash. We were just hoping to get to, like, cash flow breakeven.

And Giamatteo says that decades-low share price could soon be a distant memory.

“This time next year, we’ll be having a conversation,” he added. “What are you going to do with your cash? Are we going to do a buyback? Are you going to do a tuck-in with IoT? Are you going to — so, that’s what I would look for is the good problem of what we’re going to do with our cash, getting stable to profitability by taking care of our Cylance and pockets of growth. I’m not going to sit here and say, oh, it’s going to be IoT. We know that’s a good growth trajectory. Although there are some dynamics that just industry wide, we kind of need to navigate. And on the cyber side, we’ve got pockets of opportunities there, but really more stability and profitability on the cyber side. All those things combined, I think we’re pretty confident it’s not going to be a $2.35 stock price when we’re sitting here a year ago — a year from now because the fundamentals of the company has really changed in a very fundamental way.”