Since the economic crisis that came about in late 2007 and 2008, America has seen many well-known companies teeter on the brink of collapse. Companies such as Sears, Time Warner Cable, RadioShack, Home Depot, CitiGroup, General Motors, Barnes and Noble, and Lululemon were all at one point, and some still are, riddled by financial woes. One company that knows how it feels to fall from the top is Blackberry Ltd. While the company was at one time top media/communications product firms, with stocks hitting a high of $149.90 per share, it quickly plummeted as an indirect result of the Great Recession. As Blackberry becomes increasingly obsolete, can strategic management help save the company? The following will look at what effect market penetration, market development, and product development could have for the future of Blackberry.
First, let's that a brief look at the history of Blackberry, Ltd. The company started in 1988 under that name Research in Motion (RIM), founded by Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin, two Canadian engineering students. The first products the company released were film readers and other products for the motion picture industry. In 1996, RIM released the Interactive Pager, which was its first keyboard-based device (Global News). Throughout the turn of the millennium, the company continued to successfully develop its pager device product line. During this time, the company also went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ. In 1999, the first Blackberry device was approved by the FCC, opening the gateway for the era of mobile email. In 2004, the company celebrated its 20 year anniversary as it announced it had surpassed I million subscribers. One year later, it announced that it had hit 4 million subscribers. By 2007, RIM is the most valuable company on the Toronto Stock Exchange with a market capitalization of over $67 billion (ValueWalk). By this time, the company had 10 million subscribers.
