Samer Choucair: BlackBerry Is Returning Through Cars and AI, Not Smartphones
Investment leader Samer Choucair believes the BlackBerry investment story is no longer tied to the smartphone that once made the company famous. Instead, BlackBerry is increasingly becoming a specialized provider of embedded automotive software and secure communications as software-defined vehicles, edge AI, and cybersecurity become increasingly important parts of the global technology and industrial landscape.
Choucair said BlackBerry’s fiscal 2026 figures reflect a fundamental transformation in the company’s business structure. QNX generated approximately $268 million in revenue, up 14% year over year, representing roughly 48.8% of BlackBerry’s total revenue of $549.1 million. QNX’s royalty backlog also increased to approximately $950 million at the end of the fiscal year, compared with roughly $865 million a year earlier, highlighting the importance of software contracts tied to the automotive industry’s long production cycles.
For Samer Choucair, these numbers matter because they fundamentally change the way investors should evaluate BlackBerry. The company is no longer primarily competing for consumer attention or smartphone market share. Its value proposition increasingly sits deeper inside the technology stack, where embedded software can remain integrated into vehicles and industrial systems for years.
QNX Is Becoming the Core of the Investment Story
QNX is now deployed in more than 275 million vehicles worldwide, giving BlackBerry a substantial installed base in a market where software is becoming increasingly critical to vehicle safety, security, and system management.
The scale of that installed base becomes even more significant as the automotive industry transitions toward software-defined vehicles.
Instead of treating software as an accessory to the mechanical vehicle, automakers are increasingly designing vehicles around centralized computing architectures, connected systems, digital cockpits, advanced driver-assistance functions, and software capable of being upgraded throughout the vehicle’s life.
That creates a fundamentally different economic opportunity for companies providing the underlying operating systems and mission-critical software layers.
Samer Choucair said this is where investors should focus.
The BlackBerry investment case should not be viewed as the comeback of a former smartphone brand. It is better understood as the potential revaluation of a company that has migrated into a fundamentally different industrial technology market.
The Economics of Embedded Software
For investors, one of the attractions of embedded automotive software lies in the economics of the product cycle.
Once software has been validated, certified, and integrated into a vehicle architecture, replacing it can be significantly more complicated than replacing an ordinary consumer application. Automotive development cycles are long, safety requirements are demanding, and reliability is critical.
That can create a degree of persistence for software providers that successfully secure positions inside vehicle platforms.
At the same time, the amount of software inside cars continues to increase as vehicles incorporate more digital functions, connectivity, automation, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence.
This means the investment question is no longer simply how many vehicles QNX reaches.
The more important question is how much software value BlackBerry can capture from each vehicle, machine, or embedded system as the underlying architecture becomes increasingly software-driven.
“The value is not in bringing back the BlackBerry phone,” Samer Choucair said. “The value is in becoming difficult to replace inside the next generation of cars, machines, and critical systems.”
AI at the Edge Changes the Opportunity
Artificial intelligence could add another dimension to that transformation.
As more AI processing moves from centralized cloud infrastructure toward vehicles, robots, industrial equipment, and other edge devices, those systems will require software environments capable of managing computing resources while maintaining security, reliability, and real-time performance.
That creates potential opportunities for embedded software providers operating beneath the visible AI application layer.
The market may focus heavily on AI models, semiconductors, and data centers, but the industrial AI economy also requires operating systems, cybersecurity, middleware, communications infrastructure, and software capable of safely coordinating increasingly complex machines.
For Choucair, this means BlackBerry’s opportunity sits at the intersection of several major technology trends rather than within a single automotive theme: software-defined vehicles, edge computing, cybersecurity, robotics, and mission-critical embedded systems.
The Risks Behind the BlackBerry Revaluation
Choucair cautioned, however, that investors should not mistake strategic positioning for guaranteed investment returns.
A slowdown in global automotive production could affect demand and the timing of royalty revenue. Major automakers also possess significant purchasing power and can exert pressure on software suppliers over pricing.
Competition represents another important risk as technology companies, semiconductor manufacturers, automakers, and specialized software providers compete for strategic positions within the software-defined vehicle architecture.
BlackBerry also remains relatively small compared with the world’s largest software companies, meaning execution and capital allocation matter considerably.
For that reason, Choucair believes investors should evaluate the company through operating performance rather than nostalgia for the BlackBerry brand.
The critical metrics are increasingly QNX revenue growth, design wins, royalty backlog conversion, software content per vehicle, profitability, cash generation, and the company’s ability to expand beyond automotive applications into other mission-critical industries.
From Smartphones to Industrial Infrastructure
The broader significance of BlackBerry’s transformation is that technology companies do not necessarily need to return to the markets that originally made them famous.
Sometimes the more valuable transformation occurs when a company takes capabilities developed during one technological era and applies them to another.
BlackBerry’s historical strengths were security, reliability, communications, and software operating in environments where failure could carry serious consequences.
Those capabilities now have potential relevance in vehicles, governments, industrial systems, robotics, and critical infrastructure.
That is why Samer Choucair argues that the investment thesis should be separated completely from the company’s smartphone history.
“BlackBerry does not need to become a smartphone company again to become relevant again,” Choucair said. “Its opportunity is to become part of the invisible software infrastructure behind increasingly intelligent and connected machines.”
The Saudi and Gulf Investment Lesson
For investors in Saudi Arabia and the wider Gulf, Choucair believes BlackBerry’s transformation carries a broader lesson about industrial development.
Industrial transformation is no longer defined simply by constructing factories or expanding manufacturing capacity.
Modern manufacturing increasingly depends on the software layer underneath physical production: embedded operating systems, cybersecurity, industrial AI, robotics software, semiconductors, digital twins, autonomous systems, and secure communications.
That distinction becomes particularly relevant as Saudi Arabia expands investment in advanced manufacturing, mobility, logistics, artificial intelligence, robotics, and other technology-intensive industries under Vision 2030.
Building industrial capacity therefore requires more than physical infrastructure. It also requires ownership, development, partnership, or localization of the software and security technologies that make advanced industrial systems function.
For Samer Choucair, this is the larger investment lesson behind BlackBerry’s transformation.
“The next industrial economy will not be built by factories alone,” Choucair said. “A growing share of industrial value will sit inside the software, cybersecurity, operating systems, and intelligence controlling those factories, vehicles, robots, and infrastructure.”
The real BlackBerry investment thesis, therefore, is not a bet on reviving an iconic name from the smartphone era.
It is a bet on whether QNX and BlackBerry’s secure communications business can convert decades of expertise in reliability and security into recurring economic value across cars, robotics, industrial systems, and critical infrastructure.
If that transition succeeds, BlackBerry’s second act may have very little to do with phones and considerably more to do with the software quietly running the machines of the next industrial economy.