BlackBerry Limited (NYSE:BB) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Trip Chowdhry: Very good. A follow-up on the same IVY and battery management system, which is very critical component of the modern electric vehicle, and again you have technologies like in Cylance and I was wondering if you may have thought about using the machine learning models that you already have, maybe it needs to be trained on a different set of data, to automate, they may be battery management system for some performance enhancements, which occurred literally differentiate yourself and maybe you will be the only player who can offer in Software Defined Vehicles, a complete intelligence in the battery management solutions. Any thoughts on that? And that’s all from my side.

John Chen: Yes. Yes, Trip. Our lab people will know a lot more about that, and we of course will try to take advantage of the two, from a business side. But it’s not something that we are deep into yet, but that’s a good suggestion.

Trip Chowdhry: Thank you so much. Very good.

John Chen: Thanks, Trip.

Operator: The next question comes from Todd Coupland of CIBC. Please go ahead.

John Chen: Hey Todd.

Todd Coupland: Hey, John. I was wondering if you could talk about the expected quarterly cadence of IoT and cyber. What does it look like for Q2 and then the back half of the year?

John Chen: I don’t normally provide quarterly outlook, Todd, that’s a good one. Given the environment out there, I think we should be a little bit more cautious short-term and — but the year as I said, we feel good about our pipeline on all the deals that we’re working on, particularly the government deals from the cyber side. We are waiting for the OEMs on the vehicle side to kind of release their development schedules, so to speak. So, those are the two major things that we have to look forward to look at — examine very carefully and watch very carefully. So, I would say, I expect Q2 to be probably a little better than Q1. And then I expect second-half as I said, particularly on the cyber side, I expect the ARR to return to positive sequentially.

Todd Coupland: Okay, I appreciate that. And then, what are your thoughts on your contract extension, which is coming up this year. I know you’ve talked about it in the past, if you have anything incremental to say there, I would be interested. Thanks a lot.

John Chen: It’s — Todd, it’s a little complicated with the Imperium project. I’m waiting for kind of where the Imperium comes up with, I — then I will kind of make my own decision of what I wanted to do. But it’s all in good hands, so don’t worry about it, and this — I told the Board, let’s wait for where the Imperium project is at and then would just make that decision.

Todd Coupland: Right. And you had indicated, there was a lot of activity around that project, would you expect it still to take at least the summer before you get your initial findings or can it happen sooner than that?

John Chen: I — my guess, it will take, you know because we have a lot of effort going on in — when you look at separating the business, you have to look at separating the income statement, that’s an easy one. Then you have to separate the balance sheets and then you have to look at the tax side of the equation, and then you have to look at what the market offer and not offer and there’s just a ton of thing that when you cannot just skip it. And so I still expect this to be the end of summer timeframe.