What Did BlackBerry Ltd (BBRY) CEO Say About BBM Competing Against Whatsapp?

AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) has made an announcement on Wednesday morning that they will be selling the BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY)’s Classic and Passport smartphones. This announcement has come as a big help to BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY)’s CEO, John Chen who is on a mission to pump up the sales of these new devices. Chen talked on CNBC about expanding distribution channels for BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) phones and his take on competition in messenger services.

Chen said that the demand in the market for BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) Classic smartphone is very good and the big task that he has in hand is to expand the distribution channels for these devices. He mentioned that the AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T)’s announcement has come as a big help in expanding the distribution and getting their phone devices to consumers and enterprise users.

BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) has got their messenger service, BBM into the Android wearable devices. On the other hand, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB)’s acquisition Whatsapp messenger has announced that they have 700 million MAU’s now. So getting into the wearables is very important for BBM to have MAU growth and compete against the likes of fast growing Whatsapp.

“We laid out a little bit of why we believe that we could monetize the business to about 100 million for the next fiscal year starting March. We went through the roadmap this morning with a group and a lot of them has to do with increasing not only the MAU. […] We have two ways to monetize that. In the area of the wearable, to try to make that experience of BBM much more stickier and yes […] we will not only wanted to  expand the MAU through this process, but we are also going to make it  a little more sticky and spend more time with us. In addition to that we are going to start talking more about out payment system to using BBM,” Chen said.

He emphasized that BBM into wearable is mainly focused on increasing the MAU, but that only might not be enough. In addition they also need to make it a lot more stickier, which pushes the users to spend more time on the BBM platform.

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