BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) has fallen, to say the least, from a strong position to a miniscule position in the mobile business in terms of handset market shares. That’s exactly why up and coming companies like Lyft are not developing apps for the BlackBerry platform.
This reason was given by John Zimmer, co-founder and president of the transportation services company, in a discussion about BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) on Bloomberg West.
Asked by Cory Johnson why Lyft is only available on Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s iOS and Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL)’s Android, the executive hinted that BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY)’s numbers are just not relevant to his company anymore. Johnson pointed out that developing for BlackBerry’s platform may just be a strategic advantage for Lyft against rivals like Uber.
“The young demographic, specifically the early adopters of Lyft, are using iOS for the most part and also Android. And so [BlackBerry] just hasn’t been a focus for us,” Zimmer said.
He pointed out that for any platform they would develop an application and system for, his company would have to deploy a reasonably large team to develop the application and maintain it. He also admitted that even though Lyft monitors numbers like market share, he has not looked into BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY)’s market share for a while now.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg’s Gerrit De Vynck said in the discussion that the company has less than 1% market share in the handsets industry now. He also said that the company’s CEO, John Chen, has a lot of balls up in the air that he’s juggling at the moment.
BlackBerry is continuing to make handsets, De Vynck said, because the company needs revenue to sustain their turnaround and transition.
Prem Watsa’s Fairfax Financial Holdings owned about 46.65 million BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) shares at the end of 2014. Fairfax is the institutional investor with the largest stake in the company.
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