BlackBerry is back, and big names are knocking at its door
Even Microsoft is eyeing up the troubled phone manufacturer
BlackBerry has suffered poor fortune in recent years, but according to a report by DigiTimes that’s all about to change.
Not only did the smartphone manufacturer declare a small but significant profit in the fourth quarter of 2014, but now tech giants are allegedly setting their acquisitional gaze in its direction. Lenovo, Huawei, Xiaomi and even the venerable Microsoft are said to be assessing BlackBerry’s worth, Microsoft even going so far as to commission investment companies to do the maths.
You’d be forgiven for thinking this is all rather out of the blue. BlackBerry phones have suffered a titanic decline in popularity in recent years, and reports like this one from the Guardian in 2013 suggested to most of us that BlackBerry was soon to be DeadBerry. Voices from the inside suggested volatile internal politics and deaf ears, one nameless source even claiming that the top dogs had simply "stopped listening to customers".
Apparently we were all wrong. The company’s new CEO John Chen has managed to claw the company back to profitability in the face of a startlingly competitive smartphone market and might actually be able to secure significant investment from a third party.
Of course, the last phone manufacturer that hopped into bed with Microsoft didn’t exactly blossom under its care, but for a company like BlackBerry whose fortunes as recently as two years ago fortold certain doom, the only way is up.
Justin Mahboubian-Jones
Contributor 
