Regions

The recent announcements for Canadian smartphone maker Blackberry are short of appalling, It had said it had a 40% decline in sales and had announced job cuts to a third of its current workforce. Like a previous technoloy firm Palm Inc, Blackberry is showing signs of a steep downward spiral without any lifeline of a last minute buyer in sight.

The firm announced yesterday it would be cutting back around 4,500 jobs as well as placing an inventory writedown of USD960 million for the second quarter of the fiscal year. Blackberry is expected to report a net operating loss of USD995 million and a sales of USD1.6 billion. This was just half of the projected USD3.03 billion estimated by analysts according to complied data by Bloomberg.

The dismal results had BlackBerry shares fall by as much as 17%. This was eerily similar to the fate of Palm Inc, a smartphone maker whose fortunes fell out of the public's favor. Similar to what BlackBerry is doing, Palm sought a comback through the introduction of a new operating system, which only resulted in disappointing market response. Palm though was able to convince Hewlett-Packard Co into acquiring the smartphone maker in 2010, but the product line was eventually discontinued.