BlackBerry Limited (BB.T) announced today that Strategy Analysis, a leading independent research firm, has determined BlackBerry® QNX® software is now embedded in over 195 million vehicles, demonstrating an increase of 20 million from the year prior.
“BlackBerry continues to clearly demonstrate its leadership position in safety-critical embedded automotive software, with both an increased vehicle count and strong growth in royalty revenue backlog. Achieving over 195 million vehicles marks the sixth consecutive year that this count has increased…,” said John Chen, Executive Chairman & CEO, BlackBerry.
It is worth noting that BlackBerry QNX is an umbrella of products rather than a singular innovation. With this in mind, BlackBerry QNX offers a variety of products, namely QNX® Neutrino® RTOS, QNX Hypervisor, and QNX Software Development Platform. Most relevant to BlackBerry’s latest news is QNX Neutrino RTOS (“Neutrino”), the Company’s Real-time Operating System (RTOS). Now, its no simple task explaining what Neutrino is, so buckle up and bear with me.
There are three major functionalities of Neutrino, including its microkernel reliability, real-time availability, and its layered security. Neutrino’s microkernel architecture prevents a failed component of a system from taking down addition components or the kernel itself. For context, a kernel refers to the head honcho of a computer program that is responsible for everything. With this in mind, Neutrino is able to restart a component immediately, with minimal impact on system performance. Next, Neutrino’s real-time availability simply optimizes computer processes, ensuring that system resources are available when needed, and that tasks get completed when they are supposed to. Last but not least, Neutrino’s layered security enables the implementation of security protocols including encryption and secure logging of system activities.
Well, that’s the crash course for just one of the handful of products included in BlackBerry® QNX®. If you’re looking for a semester’s worth of content related to everything QNX related, check out here. So why does this matter? The global automotive operating system (OS) market is expected to exceed USD$4.5 billion by 2026. This projection indicates a growing demand for vehicle embedded systems and RTOS like Neutrino, which are responsible for a range of functions in a vehicle including cruise control, navigation systems and airbags to name just a few. With this in mind, BlackBerry QNX has become a market leader for safety-certified embedded software in the automotive industry.
We continue to innovate our platform, which further strengthens our market advantage. BlackBerry QNX is very well positioned to capitalize on the secular trends of greater safety-critical software in the car, the transition to electric vehicles and the move towards autonomous drive,” continued Mr. Chen.
Automotive titans like BMW, Ford and Mercedes-Benz have come to trust Blackberry’s QNX software in a broad range of critical systems including Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), Digital Cockpits and Secure Data Gateways. As a result, Blackberry QNX royalty revenue backlog has increased to $490 million at the end of its first quarter of fiscal 2022, representing a 9% increase from $450 million last year. The backlog metric is calculated using contracted prices and future production volume estimates provided by the customer when they award BlackBerry a design win. A design win refers to an agreement to sell a given product, in this case BlackBerry QNX, to a customer. Keep in mind, BlackBerry has established design wins with 23 of the top 25 electric vehicle automakers.
BlackBerry’s share price opened at $16.07, up from a previous close of $15.92. The Company’s shares are down -1.26% and are currently trading at $15.72 as of 12:07PM ET. This indicates that there has been some change following the news.
