Blackberry lost a big enterprise customer today. Home Depot announced that it will soon replace 10,000 of its workers’ Blackberries with iPhones, causing the stock to take a nearly 5 percent tumble today.
Research in Motion recently rebranded itself to Blackberry, the name of its line of phones, a move that coincided with the launch of two new phones — the touchscreen Z10 and the keyboard-ed Q10 — running its latest operating system Blackbery 10. The company is banking on BB10 as a way to make it a relevant player alongside Google and Apple, which produce the obviously popular iOS and Android operating systems. The company also brought on Grammy-winning singer Alicia Keys as creative director.
A Home Depot spokesperson confirmed to Reuters that it will be replacing Blackberry phones with iPhones for its “executives, managers, and corporate staffers.”
The launch of those phones, however, revealed that investors might find Blackberry’s efforts “too little too late.” The stock closed down 12 percent that day. Blackberry soon thereafter announced that it would not be releasing the phones in Japan, as the market has not been favorable for sales.
The company’s stock closed down 4.16 percent today at $15.73 a share.
“We have over 2,700 unique businesses in North America already registered for our BlackBerry 10 Ready Program,” Blackberry spokesperson Amy McDowell told Reuters. “We are confident that BlackBerry is, and will continue to be, the best solution for corporations managing large smartphone deployments.”
And if only to add insult to injury, Keys was spotted tweeting from her iPhone. Ouch, sick burn.
Home Depot image via daysofthundr46/Flickr
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