How did BlackBerry Become a Meme Stock?
Like many, I was captivated by the unfolding of the GameStop saga. A demonstration of how everyday investors can move the market. A few other old-school stocks got taken along for the ride, even those without high short interest, a key catalyst for the rally. One of these was BlackBerry. BlackBerry is a nostalgic brand for me, a company that hadn’t crossed my mind for over a decade. So when I kept seeing the name popping up, I was curious to what had happened.
The first posts I could find dates back to Nov 28th 2020, which then cascaded into subsequent posts shortly afterwards spanning a series of popular threads in early December and January, unintentionally tying it with GameStop.
Without reiterating these threads, revenue appears to be lacking while also being dragged down by their old branding. When BlackBerry first announced their partnership with Amazon back in Jan 6th 2020, there was minimal price action. It wasn’t until Dec 1st 2020 where they re-hashed their previous announcement, but this time stating a multi-year agreement which surged interest.
Interestingly, QNX, their backbone in the EV market wasn’t intentionally designed for the automotive space, but rather the mobile market, a quote from Alec Saunders, QNX’s former marketing VP. Although the direct link to his blogpost is now unavailable.
“QNX has long been looking for a partner with whom to enter the mobile space. For example, almost 10 years ago I was the marketing VP at QNX for a short period of time. Even then, QNX CEO Dan Dodge thought that the real prize in the embedded OS market was the mobile handset.”
All the pieces seem to be aligned for BlackBerry, shifts towards EV and AV, confirmation of drones, expanding partnership with Baidu (first announced in 2018), Lucid Motors hiring QNX engineers. But it is doubtful we will see any price movement until implications of revenue, similar to what transpired with the Amazon announcement.
Disclaimer: Holding 1400 shares for a nice payout or never financially recovering.