BlackBerry pink slips a further 200 staff

Redundancies come as CEO John Chen chews over the future of BlackBerry's handset business

BlackBerry is laying off another 200 staff in a new round of cuts that will see a further 125 job losses at the Canadian firm's corporate headquarters in Waterloo, Ontario, and 75 jobs lost at a manufacturing facility in Sunrise, Florida.

BlackBerry made the announcement following speculation that as much as 35 per cent of the company - about 2,000 staff - was to be made redundant, despite broadly positive financial results reported in December.

It also follows a cut of around 200 staff in September among teams who had been working on BlackBerry 10 devices in advance of the launch of the company's first Android-based smartphone, the BlackBerry Priv. Some key figures have also left, including Dan Hodge, who had led the QNX real-time operating system division, who left in September.

The job losses come as CEO John Chen (pictured), the highly regarded former chief at Pyramid Technology and Sybase, mulls the future of BlackBerry's handset hardware business. Since 2010, the company's smartphone market share has dropped from 20 per cent to less than one per cent - a decline only surpassed by Nokia, whose Symbian-based devices comprised 47 per cent of the market back then, according to analyst group Gartner.

However, the size of the job losses indicate that Chen is not planning to exit smartphones. "The reality is they are really trying to make a pivot to a software business, so everything they are doing is laser-focused on that. There may be people from the legacy business who are not attuned to that," Cormark Securities analyst Richard Tse told the local Globe and Mail newspaper.

But, he added: "I think there's a chance, maybe later this year, they will consider shutting that business down but I don't think it's now. They are still rolling the Priv out in brand new markets."

The company shipped 700,000 handsets in the last quarter, but announced further distribution deals with major US mobile telecoms operators. In the UK, both Vodafone and EE have started offering the BlackBerry Priv on their networks, after Carphone Warehouse had been the only distributor on launch. The company is reportedly planning to launch a second Android device very soon.

The company has struggled to persuade telecoms operators to offer its devices after they were left with millions of hard-to-shift Z10s back in 2013.