How BlackBerry Plans to Win Your Heart Again CEO John Chen says the company is working on a set of products that will help it to regain its faltering share of the smartphone market.
By Karma Allen
This story originally appeared on CNBC
BlackBerry CEO John Chen said the company is working on a set of products that will help it to regain its faltering share of the smartphone market.
Speaking from the sidelines of the Milken Institute Global Conference on Monday, Chen said the company plans to focus more on more security, privacy and increasing productivity with its devices.
"I'm not at liberty to tell you what we're doing beyond the Amazon apps, but we're working hard at it … something [is] brewing," Chen said in an interview with CNBC's "Fast Money Halftime Report."
"It's really about creating the next cool phones, so to speak. It will evolve. There are opportunities to regain the market share."
Without giving too much away, Chen said the company will focus a lot on enterprise apps, specifically those related to health care and the Internet of Things.
The lack of "applications has been one of our Achilles' heel in the last couple of years, [and] we're doing two things about it," he said.
"[I] think there's a new generation of apps coming. That's an important thing. You don't want to just kind of play in the old game. You got to get ahead. And we're working that."
In February, BlackBerry rolled out software that gave users access to Android apps and games through Amazon Appstore. The smartphone maker said the move would bring more than 200,000 new apps to BlackBerry handset users.
BlackBerry has struggled to remain relevant in the smartphone industry as more consumers shift to Android and Apple iOS-operated devices.
During the fourth quarter of 2014, Blackberry represented about 0.4 percent of the global mobile OS market while Android and Apple iOS had 76.6 percent and 19.7 percent, respectively, according to International Data Corp.
Blackberry OS posted the only year-over-year decline among the leading operating systems, falling 69.8 percent from 2013 levels, IDC said.
