BlackBerry Ltd is cutting jobs at offices around the world as it brings together the different parts of its shrinking smartphone business.
The cutbacks come as the Waterloo, Ontario-based company works to make its device unit profitable again, BlackBerry said on Friday in an e-mailed statement. Company spokeswoman Lisette Kwong declined to say how many employees were affected. The company had 7,000 employees as of September last year.
“We have made the decision to consolidate our device software, hardware and applications business, impacting a number of employees around the world,” BlackBerry said in the statement.
After its global market share fell to less than 1 percent, BlackBerry narrowed the target audience for its phones to financial professionals and government workers who demand a rigorous level of security.
While reining in BlackBerry’s hardware ambitions, chief executive officer John Chen (程守宗) is expanding in software, making more applications that work on other manufacturers’ mobile devices. Revenue is still falling, but Chen has stemmed cash losses and BlackBerry began to post profits late last year.
The company also plans to buy back and cancel as many as 12 million shares, or 2.6 percent of its public float, to offset a new employee share purchase plan.
The employee stock plan, which is to increase the amount of shares available for compensation, is to be presented for approval at the company’s annual general meeting on June 23, the company said.
“We intend to take advantage of our strong cash position to purchase our shares when the market price does not reflect what we view to be the underlying value and future prospects of our business,” Chen said in a statement on Thursday.
BlackBerry plans to buy the shares within the next 12 months on the NASDAQ Stock Market and, pending regulatory approval, on the Toronto Stock Exchange, according to the statement.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
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