BlackBerry has no top executives left at its Waterloo headquarters or anywhere else in Canada—its entire executive team is based in California.
All eight of the company’s top executives are based out of its Bay Area offices. Including employees in senior leadership roles listed on the company’s website, a total of four out of 15 senior staff are based in Canada—two of whom work out of the Waterloo headquarters.
The geographic distribution of BlackBerry’s executive team has shifted drastically under John Chen, who took over as CEO in 2013.
Talking Point
BlackBerry is heralded as an iconic Canadian company, but none of its executives are based in the country. Since John Chen became CEO in 2013, its executive team has gradually migrated from its Waterloo headquarters to the San Francisco Bay Area. Though it still refers to itself as a Waterloo-based company—and clinched $40 million from the Justin Trudeau government in February—BlackBerry’s decisions, and much of its growth, are happening south of the border.
In 2008, when BlackBerry shares reached their historic high point, six of the company’s seven-person executive team was based in Canada, five of whom worked out of the company’s global headquarters in Waterloo. In 2012, five of the company’s six executives resided in Canada; one was based in the U.S. by then, with no one in California.
Less than a year into Chen’s leadership, though, four out of 10 executives were based in California and just two of the team was left in Ontario. By 2017, the company had no executive presence in Waterloo or elsewhere in Canada; all of its executives were in the U.S., with five of the seven in California.
“We’re a proud Canadian company headquartered in Waterloo, and for you to suggest otherwise would be wrong and misleading,” said San Francisco-based Sarah McKinney, head of corporate communications for BlackBerry, in an email to The Logic. “I’ll also add that the majority of our R&D takes place in Canada.”
McKinney did not answer The Logic’s questions regarding why the company has shifted its executive team from Waterloo to the San Francisco Bay Area, or whether it would consider moving its headquarters to Silicon Valley, or any of its other four offices in California.
Although its executive team has migrated south, BlackBerry still has eight offices in Canada with roughly 2,000 employees, about half of its global workforce. Its Kanata, Ont.-based office, in particular, is seeing substantial growth. Last month, the federal government announced a $40-million boost to develop its autonomous-vehicle software out of the Ottawa-suburb office, where the company expects to create 800 new jobs over the next decade.
Despite having no top executives left in Canada, however, BlackBerry is still held up as a beacon of Canadian innovation and success. For its 35th anniversary earlier this month, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delivered a video tribute to the company, calling it a “global icon.”
“Decades ago, you put Canada on the map as a hub for the technology of tomorrow, and over the years, you’ve built a reputation as one of the most reliable and cutting-edge software providers in the world,” said Trudeau. “The government of Canada is proud to support you, and we will keep investing to help Canada’s innovators grow, create jobs and thrive.”
Chen, a Hong Kong-born American executive, came to BlackBerry with extensive experience in—and ties to—Silicon Valley. He began his engineering career in southern California after graduating from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), later becoming the CEO of Sybase, a software vendor in the Valley focused on data management and analytics. Chen currently sits on the board of the Walt Disney Company, Caltech and the San Francisco Symphony—all based in California—as well as the National Committee of U.S-China Relations. He has no board positions in Waterloo or elsewhere in Canada.
BlackBerry, formerly Research in Motion, tapped Chen to lead the company at a difficult time for the pioneering smartphone-maker. By the early 2010s, the mobile device market was saturated with competitors like Apple and Samsung, and BlackBerry was rapidly losing customers and revenue. In 2013, Fairfax Financial Holdings led a US$1.25-billion refinancing deal in BlackBerry, after Fairfax’s planned takeover of the company fell through. The Globe and Mail reported at the time that Fairfax made the deal on the condition that Chen would be named BlackBerry’s CEO, replacing Thorsten Heins, who had been at the helm for less than a year. Chen agreed, given he could stay in California and use a company jet to travel between there and the company’s headquarters in Waterloo.
Chen is the only CEO in the company’s 35-year history to be based outside Waterloo.
After his appointment, Chen continued the company’s layoffs worldwide in an attempt to conserve resources. Waterloo took the biggest hit with more than 2,200 jobs cut in a six-month period between 2013 and 2014, following the dismal launch of the new BlackBerry 10 operating system, which was predominantly developed by a team in Waterloo. At its height, BlackBerry employed close to 11,000 people in the Kitchener-Waterloo area; by 2014, the hometown workforce had already shrunk to about 2,700. Today, it’s a tenth of its peak size, according to employee data on LinkedIn. Still, BlackBerry describes itself as Waterloo-based on its website and in all its press releases.
The company has since rebounded from its free-fall and is growing again in certain markets, particularly in the U.S. Earlier this month, it announced BlackBerry Government Solutions, a new subsidiary based in Washington, D.C. that will sell cloud-based communications services to the U.S. government. This year, the company acquired Cylance, a cybersecurity firm based in Irvine, Calif. In fact, four of the seven acquisitions BlackBerry made since Chen’s appointment were of California-based companies. Three were based in Europe. None were from Canada.
Chen’s biggest task since becoming CEO has been spearheading a pivot at BlackBerry, taking it from a hardware-centric business to one focused on software in cybersecurity technology and, more recently, autonomous vehicles. At the same time, BlackBerry’s executive team has turned over completely; at the board level, five of the nine directors were appointed under Chen—Wayne Wouters is the only new member based in Ontario, with the others in California, Virginia and New Jersey, according to the company’s website and annual reports filed with securities regulators.
Chris Plunkett—vice-president of external relations at Communitech, a Kitchener-Waterloo-based innovation hub—noted that BlackBerry’s executive exodus from Canada is a factor of Chen, a Silicon Valley veteran, hiring people in his own professional circles. For example, four of Chen’s seven top executives—CFO Steven Capelli, executive VP of enterprise products Billy Ho, HR executive VP Nita White-Ivy and CMO Mark Wilson—all worked for him at Sybase.
Barring the executive retreat from its headquarters, Plunkett credits Chen with managing to preserve more jobs in Waterloo and Canada than he expected, given what seemed like the company’s inevitable collapse before Chen took over.
“It was hard dealing with the number of people that left in the layoffs, and we—Communitech and others—worked really hard to land those people in this region or Ontario, and keep that talent in Canada,” said Plunkett. BlackBerry still has more employees in Waterloo than it does in all of the U.S., and the total Canadian workforce is more than double that in the south, according to employee data on LinkedIn. “The fact that [Chen] was able to avoid a total collapse meant that we had time to do that and work with BlackBerry and others to keep that talent here. Otherwise, it would have been a lot harder—you would have seen a lot more people leave for the Valley or New York or elsewhere,” said Plunkett.
