Blackberry's New Head for Devices and Emerging Solutions

Blackberry is a technology company that is well-known for its line of wireless handheld devices. This company was one of the pioneers in the world of smartphones with its Blackberry models. In 2011, the company was the sixth largest manufacturer of smartphones in the world and in 2012, more than eighty million people worldwide had subscribed to the blackberry network.

However, the last few quarters have not been good for this Canadian company because it faced intense competition from Android and iPhone sales.  The third quarter of 2013 saw the company post a loss of $4.4 billion and its revenue fell by 56 percent. This company lost around $8.37 per share and this enormous loss put a question on the future of blackberry and its competitiveness in the smartphone market.

To counter these challenges and to improve the position of Blackberry in the smartphone market, the CEO of Blackberry John Chen has appointed a new leader for the Devices and Emerging Solutions segment. Chen appointed Ron Louks, the former executive of HTC Corp and Sony Ericson to head this department. Louks will directly report to Chen.

The appointment of Louks is expected to bring up interesting changes in Blackberry. Louks will use his experience he gained when he was the CTO of Sony Ericson and the CEO of the OpenMS Group to turn things around for Blackberry. He is likely to focus on the road map of Blackberry that includes the hardware, software and the product design of Blackberry's products.

This appointment of Louks comes at a time when the top heads of the company including its COO, CFO, CMO and global creative director quit Blackberry for better opportunities. To fill these positions is going to be arduous task considering the current state of affairs of Blackberry. It is hoped that Louks will inspire many more talented and experienced people to join Blackberry and to turn it around within the next few years.