Blackberry stuck with $1 billion slashes in Unsold Phones

             Shares of BlackBerry were halted at about 3:30 p.m. ET and plunged 20% when trading resumed. For the day they closed down 17% BlackBerry's stock is down 26.5% this year. The news of 4,500 job cuts came late Friday afternoon, confirming layoff rumors that have been swirling about problems at the smartphone maker. It attributed the loss to a change it will take to restructure its business as well as an "increasingly competitive business environment." The anticipated operating loss is about three times larger than the consensus forecast of analysts. The company is due to report financial results on September 27.

                    The plan radically diminishes a company that popularized mobile email and minted millionaries in its native Canada, but which lost its market to rivals like Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. with disastrous results. BlackBerry has little choice but to speed its search for a buyer of its assets. Chief Executive Thorsten Heins worked for the past two years to get BlackBerry back into the racee hoped could , fine-tuning a new operating system and focusing the company's development efforts on a pair of devices hold their own with popular competitors like the iPhone. But the company now acknowledges those efforts have fallen flat, saying it would write off nearly $1 billion in inventory of the new touch screen phones. Even with this year's new lineup of phones, BlackBerry said most of the phones sold in the latest quarter were legacy models from earlier years. The situation is so dire that BlackBerry will no longer market its phones to consumers despite launching four phones this year. Instead it is focusing on the corporate and professional customers who have historically made up the core of its subscriber base.

                   The failure will fall heavily on BlackBerry's workforce, which stood at 12,700 in March. The company said it would eliminate 4,500 of those jobs as part of an effort to cut fully 50% of its operating costs. The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Blackberry was preparing to lay off 40% of its staff. BlackBerry's shares fell 17% following the news on Friday to close at $8.72. That leaves the company with a stock-market value of under $billion, down from more than $80 billion at its Zenith in 2008. BlackBerry's cash is also dwindling. The company estimated its cash fell  $500 million to $2.6 billion in the three months ended in August.

                   BlackBerry fans loyal to the device's hard keyboard wondered why the company released a touch screen phone first. Poor sales of that phone, called the $10, were responsible for the $930 million to $960 million charge for inventory announced Friday. BlackBerry said Friday it would post a loss of $950 million to $995 million for the three months that ended Aug.31. The company said its revenue for the period would fall about 45% to $1.6 billion from a year earlier.