r/investing
Is Blackberry Primed For a Comeback?
Bullish DD on BB highlighting its pivot to cybersecurity and QNX OS, strong financial turnaround, and strategic NVDA partnership.
- Successful business pivot to high-margin cybersecurity and safety-critical QNX OS with strong automotive adoption.
- Sustained financial turnaround with 8 consecutive profitable quarters and significant EPS growth diverging from stock price.
- Strong catalysts including analyst price target raises, a renewed share buyback program, and expanding AI/robotics partnerships.
Many people still see the word “Blackberry” and automatically think of the phones. So, I decided to dig in to see what the new hype around this name is. What if I told you that they have totally transformed their company into two different sectors: cybersecurity and physical AI.
Now let’s dive into the core business of what Blackberry is mainly comprised of now. There are three segments, but only two matter. QNX which is a real time OS for safety critical systems. It is quietly already operating in 255m+ vehicles. The main customers are BMW, Mercedes, Toyota, Honda, VW, Volvo. The big partnership you don’t hear about is NVIDIA. The partnership with NVDA is expanding into robotics, medical and industrial fields.
The second core of their business is cybersecurity. The government just renewed the FEDRAMP Class D (High) which is the government’s highest cloud security level. This is the only critical event-management platform certified there.
The Numbers (FY2026)
- Revenue $549.1M, +2.7% YoY (beat by 2.2%)
- Net income $53.2 M, 9.7% margin- first sustained profit
- EPS $0.09 vs -$0.014 prior year (beat by 12%)
- 8 consecutive profitable quarters
- 120%/yr avg EPS growth over 3 years while the stock fell 5% yr. That divergence is what caught my attention.
- Put simply, this is a company turning the corner, not one promising to.
Why its moving now
- Multiple price target raises from where it currently trades at ($8.93)
- Buyback renewed: 26.8 M shares through 2027. Prior buybacks averaged $3.85 which is signaling the stock is cheap.
- QNX software mentioned at Robotics Summit on NVIDIA + Intel hardware
Now I present to you the bull case. The ASIL-D cert takes years + hundreds of millions to earn. QNX stays for the products life which can be 7-10 years in automobiles. QNX wins the parts that can’t fail. The NVIDIA partnership could speed up Blackberry’s earnings through more partnerships and higher usage. If QNX is the main backbone of anything having to do with physical AI, that would be huge. If this happens, it is definitely not priced into the stock. The buybacks signal that the company thinks the stock is undervalued at these levels.
Now let’s present some bear cases. The revenue only grew 2.7%. The whole re rating needs QNX to accelerate and that’s not in the numbers yet. This is the real risk. The current P/E is above 100x so there is no room for a miss. Embedded design wins take 2-4 years to show in revenue so partnership headlines run ahead of dollars. Another bear case is that one-off items inflate the trailing earnings. This could lead to earnings looking way better than they appear.
After digging in, I think this is more than a dead phone brand- but the next earnings report on June 25 is where we find out.
Disclosure : “I’m long BB.” Not financial advice- do your own work.
No. But I find it so weird how often I run into some huge BB bull on Reddit. Usually they go on and on about QNX like it has a future.
Bag holders\*
What I figured. But how in the world did they find themselves with a BB position?
Meme stock
QNX has been around since 1982. It has a past--and a future. It's the sort of product that serves a very important niche and isn't going anywhere.
The debate on BB is whether it has the potential for significant growth after they've restructured--or whether its future is just fulfilling the same stable niche it's been in for decades. As you can see from my other comment in the thread, I can make both cases (as did OP).
This is why it's a very small portion of my portfolio and viewed by me as a speculative long term hold.
No fuck that company
I took a small position as well--of course I bought in near peak (1K shares at $10.05 USD). Should have purchased a month earlier when I was first looking, but hadn't done DD yet.
I've spent 2+ decades in tech, and a bit of that was in embedded computing and then a related business, dealing in the exact sort of industries and customers QNX targets. I even had a bootable QNX system at one point \[decade+ ago\] to do basic hardware testing, because a customer was using QNX. So I get the "stickiness" of getting designed in and being in effectively forever.
The bit that worries me is that this ends up being what a former colleague called a "lifestyle business". They get into the companies that aren't big enough, and with difficult enough requirements, that nobody larger than BB really cares enough to chase it. They can get into those sticky businesses and sustain them. It takes a lot of work up front, but it has a payoff: they have stable, predictable, recurring revenue--and now profitability. But it makes it a LOT harder to have the explosive growth story.
The first reason I invested was the idea that they can move upstack with Alloy Kore and SDP8, potentially expanding their SAM within existing customer base of automotive. If they can expand beyond just mission-critical further into the vehicle platform, per-vehicle royalties could increase by multiples while the volume play is still slow/steady growth. The second, of course, is physical AI. A large mechanical robotic device that has the weight and power to potentially kill someone is a place where an RTOS is critical. This is the one that could be a better volume play in the next 3-5 years, causing a revenue increase by multiples. Either (or both) of those paying off could cause a re-rate.
I don't expect to make a meaningful return on this stock for several years, so I'm thinking long term. But OTOH unlike many speculative plays, the stability / lifestyle business aspect is what I expect will, at the very least, cause my investment not to crash.
Is perma-bear, Karl Denninger, still pimping BB?
Oh wow, I can’t believe there is anyone else who remembers him. I used to read his market ticker forum a bunch back around 2008-2010. Probably the reason I pulled out of the maker and missed the big crash (but also missed subsequent recovery). I hadn’t thought about it, but he might have been the one who originally got me into BB in 2013!
lol…used to love him, but the perma-bears feed on the doom and gloom. It was exhausting
Yea, I got sucked into the negativity, although with what was happening in 2008-09, there was some reason. I should have gone all-in with the thought of "if it all crashes, stock market won't matter". Because of that I stayed mostly in cash for the entire recovery. Do you know if he's still around?
They have been. As OP said 8 consecutive profitable quarters. 120% EPS growth over 3 years. QNX has been quietly dominating for years. People have been leery of BB for a while so that skepticism is priced in. None of us have a crystal ball so maybe this is approaching the top or maybe this is just the beginning but they have been working at this for years and it's been about making the fundamentals work, not playing into meme stock hype.
FK BB!!!! before i started learning about investing and trading i bought BB, Air Canada, and Nokia.
Nokia was flat for yeaaaarsss
BB lost like 60% of my position 😂
Air canada like 35%
never touching BB and aair cabbage again
Android Automotive has largely won this battle. Many major automakers (Ford, Volvo, Stellantis, BMW) have actively phased out QNX-based infotainment systems in favor of Android Automotive. QNX has largely stepped back from trying to compete with Google’s massive app ecosystem and user interface dominance.
You are right that Android won at the dashboard level but these days the OS of the car has been divided into multiple areas.
Android runs at the dashboard level, which is a different level to QNX and doesnt have the same security certs
QNX is not an interface. It is the safety OS under that. Automakers use a hypervisor to run both simultaneously. BMW recently announced a partnership with QNX so not sure where you got that from
https://www.nasdaq.com/press-release/qnx-technology-help-drive-bmw-groups-next-generation-software-defined-vehicles-2026
If you own BB I feel really bad for you that you are so out of touch.
Android Automotive is NOT Android Auto.
There is no future for QNX I am sorry to tell you. It is the past.
Facts are facts bud. I like how you completely ignored the article I linked
QNX is the OS that the AI operates on top of. If you have an AI that needs to perform real world things, and for whatever reason the ai is struggling and lagging, the OS needs to step in with failsafe recovery, or chop the ai off and tell it to micro instead of macro. This is less important during training and more important during real world execution. For example, you have an ai driving a car, and a second ai managing high level stuff like pathing, and delivery locations. If the high level ai lags, control needs to be switched to low level ai and it needs to enter into recovery. Same for factory floor bots, or even nursing home bots, or in home cleaning bots. They all need an os that lets the ai fail gracefully without causing physical damage.
QNX is a real time OS, that's the reason for usage in robotics.
I'm not holding any, but I like to believe that blackberry was way before their time. I've seen companies rise, fall, and rise again, or else rise, fall, get bought out, revamp and rise again, but I think when it comes down to blackberry they were so far before their time that they just got wiped out by new and upcoming companies and tech.
I'm not some big business guru either, but I'd like to think that the idea is if they don't ever figure out how to revamp into a name that everyone can remember that doesn't hold the aura of being a classic but forgotten gem they won't be able to make a huge comeback.
I’ve been buying it. The stock tripled in 2 months .