BlackBerry’s next potential turnaround strategy: going private

BlackBerry is still trying to stage its turnaround, but it may need to go private to do so.

So says Reuters, which reports that both BlackBerry’s board of directors and CEO Thorsten Heins are warming up to the idea of making BlackBerry a private company.

The move would make sense. One of the big problems for a struggling company like BlackBerry is the constant presence of journalists, investors, and stockholders analyzing every one of its moves and every line of its balance sheet. Going private would give Blackberry a chance to fix some of its issues out of the public eye.

But this is BlackBerry we’re talking about — so there are bound to be some problems. The largest one so far seems to be that anyone considering buying or funding BlackBerry is probably thinking twice: The company’s subscriber numbers are contracting, its marketshare has eroded into nothingness, and it’s bleeding executives and employees. Oh, and that whole BlackBerry 10 turnaround thing it’s been talking about? Still hasn’t happened.

In short, any talks about BlackBerry going private are just one component of the larger ongoing issue: BlackBerry needs more time to fix its problems. Unfortunately, time is not something it has terribly much of.