BlackBerry Hires Thurber as Senior Vice President for Global Device Sales
April 27 2016 - 3:20PM
Dow Jones News
BlackBerry Ltd. has hired a new sales executive for its global
mobile-device business in its latest move to revive the struggling
operation.
BlackBerry is bolstering its sales team to establish more direct
relationships with corporate and other enterprise customers to help
generate new business, said Alex Thurber, who is joining the
Canadian technology company as senior vice president for global
device sales.
Mr. Thurber will oversee BlackBerry's in-house sales teams as
well as its efforts to generate additional revenue from
distributing devices through carriers and other partners.
"My focus is to achieve BlackBerry's strategic priority in
making the device business profitable," Mr. Thurber said in an
email.
The hiring reaffirms BlackBerry's commitment to its device
business even as the division shrinks. At the same time, it
underscores the challenges in turning around that operation amid
stiff competition from larger rivals Apple Inc. and Samsung
Electronics Co.
BlackBerry will be looking to draw on Mr. Thurber's track record
of success as head of world-wide sales at WatchGuard Technologies
Inc., a private Seattle-based developer of security firewall
technology. The executive said that during his tenure of just over
2½ years, WatchGuard went from declining revenue to six straight
quarters of year-over-year growth.
BlackBerry is largely betting on sales of higher-margin secure
software and services used by government and business to manage
their mobile networks to fuel its turnaround. It wants to augment
that push by offering handsets that foster worker productivity
while emphasizing security.
Earlier in April, BlackBerry showed that its focus is paying off
as sales from software and services more than doubled in its latest
quarter to $153 million from a year earlier. By contrast, its
smartphone operation continued to struggle despite the November
launch of the Priv, BlackBerry's first-ever Android-powered phone.
That smartphone is meant to appeal to a broader audience by
incorporating the security features of BlackBerry's older phones
with the social media and entertainment apps available through the
Google Play store.
Still, in its fourth quarter ended Feb. 29, handset sales
disappointed. It recognized revenue on 600,000 smartphones, down
from 700,000 in the third quarter, which the company blamed in part
on slowing demand for high-end smartphones. BlackBerry plans to
release two new, lower-priced Android phones this year.
Write to Ben Dummett at ben.dummett@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 27, 2016 15:05 ET (19:05 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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