BlackBerry Ltd (BBRY) Up After Dominating Pentagon’s New Network

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BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) (TSE:BB) stock climbed substantially following the news from the U.S. Department of Defense that BlackBerry phones will account for 98% of devices in one of its new networks.

Apple, Samsung not gaining many defense orders

According to the statement given by Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) last week, the Defense management system will be equipped with approximately 80,000 BlackBerrys and 1800 iPhones and iPads and Android-based phones.

BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) (TSE:BB) has lagged behind the market share of Apple and Android devices over the past few years because of a lack of features and consumer focused applications as seen in the iPhone and Samsung smartphones. In November, John Chen became the CEO of the company, and now he is restructuring the company to refocus on the business and government users by designing more phones that will have the traditional physical keyboard.

According to Bloomberg, at present Samsung, the most dominating handset maker on the Android platform, and Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) are not gaining popularity in the defense segment due to lack of some security features required by the Pentagon.

“It’s a challenging specification and other vendors are having a tough time meeting it,” says Bloomberg, citing a source. “BlackBerry has already has got it.”

DISA is supposed to launch the first phase of a new system on January 31st to facilitate its staff to work on unclassified documents from wireless devices. Out of 16 applications that the program will support, one app will be included in the first phase of the program.

BlackBerry has a healthy balance sheet

Yesterday, stock of the Canadian smartphone maker surged 8.2% to C$10.80 at 4 p.m. in Toronto, its biggest gain since Dec. 20. Last year, it dropped around 33%, but has gained 37% this year. Prior to Monday’s gain, BlackBerry climbed similarly on January 17 after a report by Citron research claimed that the stock could touch $15 on the NASDAQ stock market.

The report said that BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) (TSE:BB) has a healthy balance sheet, with strong liquidity to support its turnaround strategy and make the required investment for growth. Citron mentioned in its report that generally its research advice on short selling bets against a stock, but this is not the ideal time to make a short call on BlackBerry.

“It is suicidal to bet against well-capitalized strong management in the enterprise mobile space,” Citron said.

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