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02/06/2020

Daily Buzz: The End of the BlackBerry

The final death knells will ring in August

If you’re still a BlackBerry die-hard, we have some bad news.

Electronics maker TCL Communications, the company that distributes BlackBerry’s current smartphones, said it will stop selling them later this year, Business Insider reports.

The future of the phone company—which at one point claimed 20 percent of the global phone market—is uncertain. In a statement, BlackBerry did not say whether it will work with a different partner to produce and sell devices, but it did say the company will continue to provide support for the existing portfolio of devices until February 2022.

“2020 may mark the end of the BlackBerry brand as it relates to mobile phones,” Lisa Eadicicco writes for Business Insider.

The potential demise of the BlackBerry phone is a long time coming. The company reached its peak back in January 2010 when it achieved its highest penetration in the U.S. smartphone market, with a 43 percent share. But by 2014, following poor phone sales and the rise of competing smartphones such as the iPhone, BlackBerry’s U.S. market share had fallen to 3 percent.

In 2016, BlackBerry completely bowed out of the hardware business and stopped making its own phones, citing a shift in focus toward software manufacturing. It was then that the company began working with other companies like TCL for hardware-related products.

“Today, Samsung, Huawei, and Apple largely dominate the global market for mobile devices,” Eadicicco says.

Please select this link to read the original article from Associations Now.

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