BlackBerry to stop making phones if sell fails to reach 5mn

In a market dominated by Android and iOS, BlackBerry wants to challenge itself by either selling 5 million unit of smartphones in a year or stop making any more phones.

BlackBerry CEO John Chen in an interview to The Verge said that his goal is to sell five million smartphones a year, which will be necessary to make the business profitable. Failing to do so, Chen hinted, BlackBerry might take an exit from the smartphone business.The smartphone manufacturer was once the leading maker but lost its market share owing to tough competition from rivals Google and Apple. However, Chen firmly believes that the company would be able to revive and the latest step for the turnaround is its upcoming Priv smartphone that breaks away from the norm and runs Android along with some BlackBerry apps.

The BlackBerry Priv, with its better battery and antenna technology, and other high-end specs is likely to compete with Samsung and other devices.

Chen further reiterates that the market for BB10 devices is limited to the high-security business like governments and hospitals, where strongly encrypted devices are required.

Although the company will continue to offer such customers periodic software updates, but given the fact that such a customer base doesn’t frequently change their device, it is hard to predict adoption of the new hardware.

Meanwhile, getting other customers switch to Priv is another difficult task as it has become nearly impossible to purchase a BlackBerry device in carrier stores in the US because people don’t consider BlackBerry while buying a new device. To address the issue, Chen says he is working directly with carriers to sell the latest Priv so that the larger Android consumer base is able to relate to the platform and consider the switch.

While such a high-target of sales for BlackBerry devices might be crucial at this moment when the company that is grappling with low smartphone sales, if the target remains unachieved or under-achieved, the BlackBerry Priv might be the last BlackBerry device.