Blackberry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) (TSE:BB) CEO John Chen spoke with FOX Business Network’s (FBN) Maria Bartiromo on Opening Bell with Maria Bartiromo about their new partnership with Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), which was announced earlier today. Chen said the partnership is “something that needs to be done,” and that it is a “good way to emphasize the strength of both companies.” He went on to say that the partnership will “benefit our customers” by allowing Blackberry to continue to “be very focused on the high-end phones and very focused on the enterprise side of the equation,” while Amazon handles “the consumer side of the applications.”
BlackBerry CEO on the deal with Amazon:
“One of the things that determines a phones success is the applications. We’ve been working on our BB10, Blackberry 10 applications ecosystem and we have about 130,000 applications on our Blackberry World. You know Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) has been doing very well and they have about 240,000 applications and continue growing. And the fact that they like to get into the phone side of the equation which has also helped us. So I figured that the best thing to do is I want the company focused more on enterprise so our effort, the resources we spent on getting applications is going to be very much focused on enterprise, highly secure kind of an application and then our partnership through Amazon will provide us the consumer side of the applications so it benefits our customers both ways. So over time we obviously will collaborate more on building more apps and our developer communities are quite large and we will encourage them to write apps on the Amazon Appstore.”
BlackBerry CEO on whether Blackberry will continue to focus on security technology:
“Yes, absolutely.”
BlackBerry CEO on expectations in market share following the Amazon deal:
“I honestly I haven’t really focused on that side of the equation. I think we were just talking about how we could help each other out and I think this is a good way to emphasize the strength of both companies, and over time, when we see the traction in the market I’ll come back and let you know.”
BlackBerry CEO on the benefits of the partnership:
“Again this is something that needs to be done. Again over time we are encouraging developers to start developing in the Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) ecosystem. They have a great console, they have a lot of great tools and pricing methods to help our application providers. And that will create quite a seamless move that anybody on the Amazon ecosystem and wants to move to the Blackberry World you don’t have to change applications. The same application runs on all the devices, so it’s quite exciting so you can think about good things to come.”
BlackBerry CEO on the phones market:
“The phones continue to be a good market and applications continue to be a good driver of it. And as I pointed out earlier I am going to be very focused on the high-end phones and very focused on the enterprise side of the equation and the enterprise applications. I think we chatted in the past about how regulated industry, the financial, health care and government, and that remains to be the number one focus of mine and my team and the rest of the consumer space we will reach out through our partners.”
