Article content continued

“We didn’t have to borrow a dime. We just sat down and wrote a cheque for $1.4 billion,” chief executive John Chen said during an extensive interview with the Financial Post from BlackBerry’s San Ramon, Calif., office, where Chen is based.

“The fact that we were able to write a cash cheque for $1.4 billion — that’s not a trivial amount of money — to buy a company, all cash, should tell everybody that the turnaround is definitely more than over.”

In some ways, the deal is the culmination of the business strategy put in place by Chen when he took over in 2013, a time when BlackBerry’s future was very much in doubt and the company was in desperate need of a “turnaround artist” at the helm — an artist who clearly feels like he’s succeeded to this point.

The all-cash deal is a point of pride for Chen. In public appearances since the deal was announced, he has said BlackBerry probably owed people $2 billion with no ability to pay it when he became CEO.

Photo by Michael Short for National Post

These days, they’ve got some walking-around money.

“Next year, especially together with Cylance, our software revenue will top over $1 billion,” Chen said. “There are not too many security companies at $1-billion revenue. We make money.”

That’s a big change from just a few years ago when, if you were being unkind, BlackBerry wasn’t much more than a basket of parts: old patents, brands and products left over from the company’s high-flying days after it invented the global smartphone market.

Today, BlackBerry executives would have you believe the company is drawing on years of secure communications expertise to position itself as a global cybersecurity leader in a burgeoning new market.