BlackBerry Ltd. (TSE:BB) (NASDAQ:BBRY) Struggling With The Market

Many BlackBerry Ltd. (TSE:BB) (NASDAQ:BBRY) investors were shocked and horrified when news came out of the alliance between Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) and International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM). The crash caused by said investors abandoning BBRY after the announcement was certainly a severe blow, but was this panicked reaction really warranted?

Marty Beard, BBRY’s new COO doesn’t seem to think so. In an interview with Clint Bulton of Wall Street journal, he was asked to share his thoughts on the deal between BBRY’s titanic rivals. In his commentary, he appears anything but alarmed: 

“It highlights that enterprise mobility is important. It takes a lot of work to make those successful. The market is enormous, so even if they are wildly successful, there’s a huge market. Obviously it’s competition, but that doesn’t mean they win 100% of the market.”

That seems to be a very reasonable point. The global handheld market is already enormous, probably large enough to encompass more than just Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) and AAPL. BBRY expects to be able to successfully capitalize on that fact, as well as on said market’s continued expansion.

The acquisition of SecuSmart GmbH is just a stepping stone on BBRY’s path to taking up the “security-oriented” niche of the market. As analyst Maribel Lopez of Forbes.com has stated, BBRY will most likely need to acquire other pieces of the puzzle over time. She also noted that “None of this is a trivial task, but BBRY needs to pivot from being a device company to being a provider of next generation security solutions”. 

Presently, it looks like BBRY is doing just that.