Yet another executive exodus at Blackberry as three more senior managers leave

BlackBerry has confirmed three more senior executives are leaving the Canadian smartphone maker as an exodus of senior management continues at the company.

BlackBerry’s corporate information technology operations vice-president Doug Kozak, global manufacturing and supply chain senior vice-president Carmine Arabia, and service operations vice-president Graeme Whittington are all leaving the company.

The departures were confirmed to Canadian public broadcaster CBC by BlackBerry spokeswoman Rebecca Freiburger.

“We are in the second phase of our transformation plan where we will be assessing our organization — from top to bottom — to ensure we have the right people in the right roles with the right skill sets to drive new opportunities in mobile computing.”

Last month, BlackBerry’s marketing boss, Richard Piasentin, left the company as its chief executive, Thorsten Heins, admitted the company’s PlayBook tablets weren’t powerful enough to receive an update to BlackBerry 10, despite previous commitments.

Around the same time, T.A. McCann, a vice president responsible for overseeing BlackBerry messenger and the social networking apps also left, joined Marc Gingras, who designed the company’s BlackBerry 10 Hub feature.

The resignations come as new IDC figures show BlackBerry’s worldwide smartphone shipments fell to just 6.8 million units during the second quarter of 2013.

This was down by 11.7% year-on-year from 7.7 million units during the second quarter of 2012, despite the release of the company’s BlackBerry 10 series of smartphones.

The losses in shipment volume came despite the worldwide market for smartphones growing 51.3% year-on-year, from 156.2 million units in the second quarter of 2012 to 236.4 million units in the second quarter of 2013.

In terms of marketshare, Blackberry has slumped from 3.7% of the worldwide smartphone market to 3.1% in just one year.

As a result, BlackBerry has recently announced it is laying off 250 workers, with R&D and manufacturing support impacted.

The recent job losses come on top of the 2000 staff cut, representing 10% of it’s the company’s global workforce, in May last year.

The company also announced the departure of a further 3000 jobs in August of last year, following the announcement of a $US518 million quarterly loss, with chief executive Thorsten Heins claiming at the time “there’s nothing wrong with the company as it exists right now”.