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 Chief Operating Officer Kristian Tear and Chief Marketing Officer
Frank Boulben, both hired by recently ousted CEO Thorsten Heins,
will leave the struggling smartphone maker.
And the company said Monday that Brian Bidulka is being replaced by
James Yersh as chief financial officer. Yersh previously served as
senior vice president and controller.
Former Sybase CEO John Chen was brought in as the interim chief
executive after negotiations to sell the Waterloo, Ontario, company
collapsed this month. Chen also serves as executive chair of the
board.
BlackBerry quickly lost dominance as the leading smartphone maker as
the popularity of the iPhone surged. The much-hyped BlackBerry 10
system, its latest phones, were a flop. The company disclosed in
September that it would book nearly a billion dollars in losses
related to unsold phones.
The company recently announced 4,500 layoffs, or 40 percent of its
global workforce, and reported a quarterly loss of nearly $1
billion.
Chen said he'll continue to align the management team with his
priorities. "I look forward to working more directly with the
talented teams of engineers, and the sales and marketing teams
around the world to facilitate the BlackBerry turn-around," Chen
said in a statement.
BGC analyst Colin Gillis said the reshaping of a leadership team is
what a CEO does and that the company should just name Chen as CEO.
"You let whoever is going to be the CEO makes those decisions. It
kind of bothers me because it just seems like the search process is
a farce. I mean the guy has a more than an $80 million pay package.
He's blown out every other top manager. That's not your decision to
make as interim CEO," Gillis said.
Gillis expects Chen to be named CEO on Dec. 20 when BlackBerry
reports third quarter earnings.
And spokesman Adam Emery said the company will have a further update
on its leadership team Dec. 20. Emery said they will not have a
chief marketing officer and a chief operating officer in its new
organization structure. Gillis said one could infer that an
enterprise-focused business would have less need for marketing and a
chief marketing officer than a consumer-focused business.
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Chen, whose background is in enterprise software, has placed much
more of an emphasis on BlackBerry's software business than its
handset, or smartphone business. Chen told The Associated Press
earlier this month that he would be looking for a CEO with a strong
software and services background, and noted that he wanted to
monetize BlackBerry Messenger, the popular messaging application.
BlackBerry also has a mobile device management business, which
allows IT departments to manage different devices connected to their
corporate networks.
Fairfax head Prem Watsa, BlackBerry's largest shareholder, has
praised Chen's work turning around Sybase, an enterprise software
data management company. Chen was chairman and CEO from 1998 until
the company was acquired in 2010 by SAP AG.
Gillis said Chen clearly wants to make BlackBerry more of a software
company. The new direction could mean the company might ultimately
get out of the business of selling smartphones.
"The path that he's choosing, it might work, or he could kill the
(company) completely, whatever value it has left," Gillis said.
Shares of BlackBerry rose 10 cents, or 1.5 percent, to $6.34 in
morning trading on the Nasdaq. BlackBerry is worth $3.2 billion. It
once had a market cap of over $80 billion.
The decline of the BlackBerry has come shockingly fast. In 1999,
BlackBerry became a game-changing breakthrough in personal
connectedness. It changed the culture by allowing on-the-go business
people to access wireless email. Then came a new generation of
competing smartphones, and suddenly the BlackBerry looked ancient.
Apple debuted the iPhone in 2007 and showed that phones can handle
much more than email and phone calls. In the years since, BlackBerry
been hammered by competition from the iPhone as well as
Android-based rivals.
[Associated
Press; ROB GILLIES]
Copyright 2013 The Associated
Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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