BlackBerry Might Give Up Making Phones

BlackBerry won't continue making smartphones if it can't make any profit on them, according to CEO John S. Chen in an interview with Reuters.

Chen said he thinks BlackBerry can still make a profit if it's able to ship about 10 million phones per year. But that's nowhere near the volume its biggest competitors sell. For example, Apple sold 51 million iPhones in the last quarter of 2013 alone.

"If I cannot make money on handsets, I will not be in the handset business," Chen told Reuters.

Instead, BlackBerry seems to be shifting its focus from the consumer market to the enterprise market. Today, it's holding a press event to go over its plans for mobile devices for large companies.

Chen became BlackBerry's CEO last fall after the company failed to go private in a $4.7 billion deal from private equity firm Fairfax. Last year, BlackBerry was betting that its new smartphone operating system, BlackBerry 10, would turn the company around. But devices running the software didn't sell very well. Then-CEO Thorsten Heins stepped down and Chen took over.