BlackBerry could spin off messaging service BBM into new company

ONTARIO — BlackBerry is considering spinning off its popular messaging service BBM to form a new company, reports claim.

The troubled Ontario-based smartphone maker is considering options for its future, including a break-up or sale, but has already confirmed that the popular BlackBerry Messenger service will launch on rival platforms such as Apple’s iOS and Google Android later this summer, reported the Daily Telegraph.

Spinning it off completely, as the Wall Street Journal suggests, would allow the new business to operate with greater independence, but it would also pitch it against much larger services such as Skype, owned by Microsoft, standalone messaging apps such as WhatsApp and increasingly popular in-house options owned by other manufacturers, including Samsung’s ChatOn.

BBM is widely perceived as BlackBerry’s most valuable asset aside from its corporate email, BlackBerry Enterprise Server. The company is thought to be keen to position some of its services as particularly valuable in advance of any restructuring. Although BBM retains a loyal core of users, its 60m users are already dwarved by the 200m people who use the WhatsApp service, which currently works across platforms, and has replaced text messages for many of its young users.

“We have announced our plans to offer this trusted mobile messaging service to iPhone and Android users sometime this summer,” a BlackBerry spokesman said. “We have made no further announcements.”

BlackBerry has dithered over what to do with BBM for as long as three years, it has been claimed, with some executives seeing the messaging service as a unique selling point for the company’s own phones, while others argued that it would only decline if it was not made available more widely on more popular platforms. The announcement this year that the service would finally come to Android and iOS was pitched as a sign of BlackBerry’s confidence that users would value the service over others on phones made by rival manufacturers.

Since BlackBerry’s decision to form a sub-committee examining how it might sell or spin-off some elements, the company’s share price has fallen by almost a third to around US$10 (S$12.8). AGENCIES