Think no one reads analysts’ reports? Think again.

In addressing BlackBerry shareholders at the company’s annual meeting this week, CEO John Chen gave a spirited defense of his vision for the future.

Interestingly, he also discussed how BlackBerry has courted analysts at research firms, noting the crucial role their reports play in buying decisions.

“[I]f you open up any analyst report it’s always negative, everything BlackBerry does is bad,” Chen said, according to a transcript of the meeting as provided by business news site SeekingAlpha.

“It doesn’t matter, even if we sit in a corner of the street and start passing out money, it’s still bad.

“And they will question how much money we’re passing out, why we’re doing it and so forth and it’s not enough type of thing.

“So I am pleased to announce that working with them in the last few years, we finally got through some recognition and these are important, the reason why these are important is customers read those, customer subscribe to those plans, Foster, ITC, Gartner they look at those things before they make the final choice of buying decision and we’re starting to gain traction on the software, enterprise software side …

“ESSF is an acronym, very secured document sharing, that’s what it is. Think about Dropbox being secure and be able to share on the internet in a secured and encrypted way. Foster and Gartner had both recognized that as a leader of industry.”

Chen then moved on to a future view of BlackBerry, stressing his strategy of relying on software for future growth, not traditional BlackBerry handsets.

BlackBerry future

Not that BlackBerry handsets are dead.

Last October, BlackBerry launched the PRIV, which the company touts as a secure smartphone.

“PRIV has the authentic BlackBerry keyboard, legendary security, streamlined communications and productivity, combined with the wide world of Google Play store apps. It has been engineered with the world’s finest technology, and packaged in an ultra-thin, ergonomically perfect device with a keyboard hidden by SmartSlide technology,” BlackBerry says.

But Chen stresses software, software, software.

“So if you look at, we are serving some really exciting new markets that is needed, that is going to be growing, that is going to be robust, cross platform software …,” he explained.

“When we were doing very well, as a company in handset, I believe 2007, 2008, everybody uses a BlackBerry, we all grew up using a BlackBerry. At that it was easy to create a software that’s just to connect with BlackBerries. Unfortunately a number of events have taken and by the early or by early 2010, 2011 we started losing that market status.

“So today, there are at least 3 billion cell phones out these and is growing and replaying. Unfortunately we don’t enjoy the leading share of that. We still have some very strong footprint in the selected industry like the government, but we don’t have, we don’t the mass … And so result of that we need to recognize to grow our business, will you grow on everybody’s devices, not just Blackberry devices.”

Chen took over as CEO of BlackBerry in 2013 as the company struggled to meet changes in the mobile device industry. As BlackBerry device sales plummeted, he shifted to the software strategy, seeking to capitalize on some 40,000 patents.

“I personally do not believe devices is going to be the future of any company,” he said.”This is no difference from PC today or server from today and I think what runs on the devices and what connects the devices and what might make the device do better is where the future is going to be and this is why we do have a cross platform strategy.”

According to Chen, the shift is paying off. He pointed out that software revenue has more than doubled over the past year to $527 million with total revenue at $2.2 billion. “Free cash flow” is $244 million, leaving the company “cash rich,” he says.

“So the company versus 2.5 years, 3 years ago is no longer in a position of having cash trouble,” Chen said.

Want to learn more?

Read the full transcript at:

http://seekingalpha.com/article/3983769-blackberrys-bbry-ceo-john-chen-hosts-2016-annual-general-meeting-transcript?part=single