A bad year just got even more choppy for BlackBerry. Yesterday, the company abandoned its plans to be bought out by investor Fairfax Financial and announced that its CEO Thorsten Heins was leaving the company with immediate effect. BlackBerry has already appointed an interim replacement, technology veteran John Chen, while announcing that it will instead raise $1bn of new funding in convertible bonds. “BlackBerry is an iconic brand with enormous potential – but it’s going to take time, discipline and tough decisions to reclaim our success,” said Chen, but BlackBerry’s share price plunged as investors expressed less confidence in its future. “This does look like panic stations,” Strategy Analytics analyst Neil Mawston tells The Guardian. “The trouble is that when a company’s in that downward spiral, nobody wants to catch a falling knife – so operators don’t want to work with them, and retailers don’t want the stock.” The research firm’s most recent stats suggested that BlackBerry had a mere 1% share of global smartphone shipments in the third quarter of this year.
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