BlackBerry Limited (BB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the BlackBerry Annual and Special Meeting of the Shareholders. [Operator Instructions] The conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to John Chen, Executive Chair and CEO of BlackBerry. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much. Good morning, everybody. On behalf of the Board and management, it is my pleasure to welcome you to the company's Annual and Special Meeting of the Shareholders. Before we begin, I would like to address the format of this year's shareholders' meeting. To proactively address the challenge -- the challenges and uncertainties of the COVID-19, and mitigate risks to the health and safety of the company's shareholders, employees and other stakeholders, we decided to hold this meeting in a virtual-only format through the live webcast. Even though the meeting is in a virtual format, procedure has been implemented to ensure that registered shareholders and valid proxy holders, regardless of their location, will have an equal opportunity to participate in this meeting and engage with directors and management of the company. Registered shareholders and valid proxy holder, including nonregistered holders who have duly appointed themselves as their proxy, who are participating online, will be able to listen to the meeting, ask questions and vote in real time. The secretary of the meeting will cover the procedures for all this in just a moment. With that said, it is my pleasure to introduce the members of the company's Board of Directors who are in attendance on this webcast today: Mike Daniels, Tim Dattels, Dick Lynch, Laurie Smaldone Alsup, Barbara Stymiest, Prem Watsa and Wayne Wouters. We also welcome our newest Director, Lisa Disbrow. In addition to the Board, we also have members of the company's executive team attending this webcast, and we are also joined by Phil Kurtz, the Deputy General Counsel and Assistant Corporate Secretary of the company. The formal part of the meeting will be chaired by me and will include my annual update on BlackBerry's strategy and performance. Following the completion of the formal business of the meeting, we will address questions submitted by shareholders. I would like -- I would now like to turn this meeting to -- call this meeting to order, sorry, and as Chair, I will ask Phil Kurtz to act as secretary of the meeting. Phil will now go over the procedures and items of businesses for the meeting. Phil?

Thank you, John. Before we move ahead, I'd like to point out a couple of important procedural matters that are a little different from prior years because of the virtual format of the meeting. [Operator Instructions] Voting on all matters will be conducted by electronic ballot. Registered shareholders and duly appointed proxy holders will be asked to vote on each business item only after the presentation of all business items. In order to expedite the formal business of today's meeting, I will make all motions. When you're asked to vote, you'll receive a message on the virtual interface requesting you to register your vote. You will only have a certain amount of time to do so when the polls are open. Preliminary voting results will be provided during the meeting, and final detailed voting results will be published on the Canadian Securities Administrators SEDAR website and on the SEC's EDGAR website and on our website after the conclusion of the meeting. With that said, I will ask Pina Pacifico of Computershare Investor Services to act as our scrutineer for the meeting. I confirm that we have received a declaration of Computershare confirming that the notice of this meeting was properly given to all of the shareholders entitled to receive it and to the directors and auditors, together with the management proxy circular and form of proxy. Copies of the management proxy circular and other meeting materials are available under the company's profile on SEDAR and on EDGAR. I'm in receipt of the scrutineer's preliminary report stating that a quorum of shareholders is in attendance. The scrutineer's report shows that there are shareholders or proxy holders in attendance on this live webcast today holding 332,975,053 common shares of the company, representing approximately 60% of the common shares issued and outstanding. I therefore declare this annual and special meeting of shareholders to be regularly called and properly constituted for the transaction of business. The first item of business is the presentation of the financial statements of the company for the fiscal year ended February 29, 2020. These include the consolidated balance sheets as at February 29, 2020, and February 28, 2019, and the related consolidated statements of shareholders' equity, operations and cash flows, together with the auditor's report. Copies of these documents have been mailed to the shareholders who requested them, and they are also available on SEDAR and EDGAR. We will now proceed with the election of directors for the ensuing year. As determined by the Board, the number of directors to be elected today is 9. As set forth in the management proxy circular, each of the following individuals has been nominated for the position of director of the company to hold office for the ensuing year and each has agreed to serve as a director, if elected: John Chen, Michael Daniels, Timothy Dattels, Lisa Disbrow, Richard Lynch, Laurie Smaldone Alsup, Barbara Stymiest, Prem Watsa and Wayne Wouters. Bylaw number A4 of the company sets out a procedure requiring shareholders to provide advanced notice if they wish to nominate any person for election as a director of the company. The company has not received notice from any shareholder intending to nominate anyone for election as a director at this meeting. Since there are no other nominations, I move to elect the directors previously named. Again, I remind you that voting on all matters to be acted upon at the meeting will take place electronically after the presentation of all business items. The next item of business is the appointment of the independent auditors of the company. I move that Pricewaterhousecoopers LLP be appointed as the independent auditors of the company until the next Annual Meeting of Shareholders, and that the Board of Directors of the company be authorized to fix their remuneration. The next item of business is the approval of 2 amendments to the company's Equity Incentive Plan: Firstly, to increase the number of common shares of the company issuable under the plan by 12 million common shares; and secondly, to amend the definition of participant under the plan to include consultants to the company and its affiliates. The company's ability to successfully execute its strategies is largely dependent on its continuing ability to attract, motivate and retain talented employees and consultants, including through the company's compensation program. The Equity Incentive Plan is an important part of this program and helps the company to compete for talent against its peers in the technology industry. The Equity Incentive Plan is also a valuable tool for aligning the interest of management, and on an exceptional basis, strategic consultants to the company with your interest as shareholders. The purpose of the proposed amendments is to ensure that sufficient common shares remain available to enable the company to continue its practice of granting equity awards to its officers and employees and to enable the company to motivate strategic consultants through the use of equity compensation. I move that the resolution to approve the amendments to the Equity Incentive Plan, as set out in the management proxy circular, be adopted. The next item of business is the approval of unallocated entitlements under the company's Deferred Share Unit Plan, or DSU plan, for directors. The maximum number of common shares of the company that may be issued under the DSU plan is expressed as a percentage, being 1%, of the company's total common shares that are outstanding from time to time. The DSU plan does not have a fixed maximum number of common shares issuable under it and is therefore considered to be an evergreen plan. Under Toronto Stock Exchange rules, unallocated equity awards that remain available for grant under evergreen plans are subject to shareholder approval every 3 years. Shareholders last approved the company's DSU plan in 2017. I move that the resolution to approve the unallocated awards under the DSU plan, as set out in the management proxy circular, be adopted. The next item of business is the approval of an amendment to the company's employee share purchase plan, or ESPP, to increase the number of shares of the company issuable under the ESPP by 6 million common shares. The ESPP is intended to encourage employees to take an ownership interest in the company by making it possible for them to acquire common shares through convenient payroll deduction. Under the plan, the company will either enable participants to buy common shares at a discount or will provide a cash contribution to subsidize the purchase. The ESPP was originally approved by the Board on May 6, 2015, and was confirmed by the shareholders of the company at the Annual and Special Meeting held on July 23, 2015. The number of common shares issuable under the plan has not been increased since that time. I move that the resolution to approve the amendment to the ESPP, as set out in the management proxy circular, be adopted. The next item of business is the approval of the nonbinding advisory resolution on executive compensation, or our say-on-pay resolution. The resolution provides that, on an advisory basis, and without diminishing the role and responsibilities of the Board of Directors, shareholders accept the approach to executive compensation disclosed in the management proxy circular. I move that the resolution be adopted. The final item of business is the approval of a nonbinding advisory resolution on the frequency of say-on-pay votes. As required pursuant to Section 14a of the U.S. Exchange Act, every 6 years, the shareholders of the company have the opportunity to cast a nonbinding vote on how often the company should hold a say-on-pay vote. The resolution provides that, on an advisory basis and without diminishing the role and responsibilities of the Board of Directors, shareholders wish the company to include an advisory vote on the company's approach to executive compensation either every year, 2 years or 3 years. The company expects to propose the next say-on-pay frequency resolution at its 2026 Annual Meeting of Shareholders. Since 2012, the company's say-on-pay policy has provided that shareholders have an opportunity to vote on the say-on-pay resolution every year. And the company continues to believe that shareholders should be able to express their views on our executive compensation program on an annual basis. I move to include an advisory vote on the company's approach to executive compensation every year. That concludes all items to be voted on at the meeting. Before we proceed with voting on the items of business presented, I would like to address recent correspondence that we've exchanged with one of our shareholders, [ Mr. Dorsey Gardner ], who's advised us that he owns less than 1% of our shares. Since the mailing of our proxy circular for this meeting, [ Mr. Gardner ] has written to the Board and to management to express his concern that Fairfax Financial could make an opportunistic bid to buy BlackBerry during the current market volatility caused by COVID-19. He believes that the Board should implement defensive measures such as a shareholder rights plan. [ Mr. Gardner ] has also expressed his view that Prem Watsa should not be a member of our Board because of conflicts of interest related to Fairfax's investment in the company and because of a 2019 court decision regarding the acquisition of Fibrek by Resolute Forest Products 9 years ago. [ Mr. Gardner ] believes that the court's commentary in the Fibrek decision disqualifies Mr. Watsa from service on our Board and that it should have been discussed in our proxy circular. I'm referring to this correspondence because the reelection of Mr. Watsa as a Director of the company is one of the voting matters for this meeting. And I will now take a moment to address [ Mr. Gardner's ] comments on behalf of our Board. Mr. Watsa is the Chairman and CEO of Fairfax, which owns roughly 8% of our outstanding shares. Significant shareholder representation on company boards is extremely common, and procedures for handling conflicts of interest are well-established at law. Mr. Watsa first joined the company's Board more than 8 years ago. During our strategic review process in 2013, Mr. Watsa resigned from the Board when Fairfax decided to participate in the process as a potential investor. He rejoined the Board several months later, only after the completion of a debt financing led by Fairfax. And when that debt was restructured in 2016, he recused himself from all Board discussions related to the restructuring. This track record shows that Mr. Watsa and the rest of our Board understand their fiduciary obligations and follow best practices in managing conflicts relating to this or any other matter as they arise. Turning to the Fibrek decision that was a case about the fair value of shares held by dissenting shareholders when Fibrek was acquired by Resolute. Mr. Watsa and Fairfax were not parties to the litigation, nor were they subject to the order of the court. Mr. Watsa's relationship to Fibrek in 2011 is easily distinguishable from his relationship with BlackBerry today, particularly because he never served as a Director of Fibrek. The decision is being appealed, mainly on the grounds that the trial judge made numerous and serious errors of law, including with regard to his findings of the conflict of interest on Mr. Watsa's part. Our proxy disclosures relating to Mr. Watsa comply with Canadian and U.S. requirements in all respects. Mr. Watsa enjoys a strong global reputation in business and community affairs, and he has been reelected as a BlackBerry director each year with overwhelming shareholder support. The company is grateful for his many contributions and reiterates the recommendation in our proxy circular that shareholders vote for his reelection at this meeting. We will now move to electronic voting on the items of business presented. As mentioned earlier, voting today will be conducted by electronic ballot. I will now take a moment to ask that the balloting be opened to registered shareholders and appointed proxy holders. Polls are now are open, and at this point, all registered shareholders and proxy holders who have properly logged in with their control numbers or user name and wish to vote will be able to see on the screen all motions being brought forth at this meeting. Please register your votes by accessing the voting page and by selecting the For or Withhold button next to the name of each proposed director and with respect to the appointment of Pricewaterhousecoopers LLP as the company's auditors. And then by selecting the For or Against button next to each of the following resolutions: Approval of amendments to the Equity Incentive Plan; approval of unallocated entitlements under the DSU plan; approval of amendments to the employee share purchase plan; and the advisory vote on executive compensation. And then by selecting, finally, the 1 Year, 2 Years or 3 Years button next to the advisory vote on the frequency of the say-on-pay vote. We will provide registered shareholders and duly appointed proxy holders with another brief moment to complete their electronic ballots. [Voting]

Once the balloting closes, the voting page will disappear, and your votes will be submitted automatically. [Voting]

The scrutineers have compiled and provided to me with a preliminary report of the ballots. On the election of directors, all 9 nominees have been elected as directors of the company to hold office until the next annual meeting of the company in 2021, or until their respective successors are elected or appointed. The motion to appoint the auditors is also carried, and Pricewaterhousecoopers LLP has been appointed as the independent auditors of the company. These and all of the other motions on the ballot were carried by a substantial majority of the votes cast. And a substantial majority also supported the frequency of 1 year for the advisory say-on-pay vote. Detailed voting results will be published on SEDAR and EDGAR and on our website after the conclusion of the meeting. It is now my pleasure to turn the meeting back over to John to provide his comments on the company's performance and strategic direction. Please note that John's presentation and the Q&A session later in the meeting will contain forward-looking statements. Shareholders should be aware that any forward-looking statements are made based on certain assumptions and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results, performance or achievements of the company to differ materially from those disclosed here today. We're adopting for this presentation the cautionary language regarding forward-looking statements that is set out in the company's annual report on Form 10-K, to which we refer you for additional details concerning the risks, uncertainties and assumptions relating to our forward-looking statements. Now John will conclude the formal part of the meeting.

Thank you very much, Phil. As there is no further business to come before the meeting, I declare the formal part of the meeting to be concluded. I would now like to make some comments and remarks about the state of the company. And I hope the -- let's see -- bear with me for -- okay. I'm hoping that you folks all see the slide with -- the title slide with my name and titles and Annual General Meeting, June 23, 2020, right? Okay. So before I start, I'd like to acknowledge the fact that it has been a rough year for our share price and our equity value. And however, I also wanted to take this opportunity to let all the shareholders know that not only the management and the Board is extremely aware of the situation, but also, at the same time, extremely bullish about our going-forward plan. And I hope that in the next 10, 15 minutes, I'll be able to lay out some of the reason of why we're very bullish, and we are committed to executing a -- our plan and to create shareholder value. So the first slide is what we now call the ambition slide. And the slide actually, I borrowed the concept from the Gartner Group, when I had a briefing with the Gartner Group not too long ago, maybe it was about -- only about 2 weeks ago. And I thought this is a slide that is a much better than the traditional mission slide, vision slide that people like to put together. And those, of course, are still useful, but I'd like to be a little bit more specific on not only about what our ambitions are and how we believe that our ambition could be achieved. So if you bear with me, and I will only take -- this slide will take a little bit longer for myself. And the rest -- I promise you, the rest of the slides will not be in that level of detail and durations. So if you go to the top, our ambitions, BlackBerry will be the must-have software provider for endpoints. And we build it upon secure, managed, connect and integrate, not only with our software, but with the entire. And this [indiscernible] is different operating system for phones like Android, iOS; different operating system for IoT devices, like Linux; and of course, our own operating system QNX. BlackBerry would deliver a whole product experience. And the following part of it, we're hoping to convince you that we are having the best whole experience as well as the breadth and the depth of our technology and products. So who are we concentrating on? Who our customer base we concentrate on? The first customer base is people that require high security and mobility management. And these typically is our regulated industry, which implied they are industrial, they're in financial, like banking, they're in government and they are healthcare. Then also that the customers that have strong interest in digital transformation. And every company at varying degrees either be very, very focused in doing digital transformation to just doing it enough to take on some business advantages. We see that pretty much across the board. Last but not least, because of our safety heritage, or the product safety heritage, that we believe that we could help people that build devices, whether they are medical devices, whether they are a car, whether they're in a smart home, whether they're in a smart city, that they'd be able to build using our product to develop, build and manufacture safety-certified endpoints. And then all that is concluded to be, today, at least a $38 billion market opportunity. And the way we get at it is to provide safety-certified API, to provide good technology for managing endpoints and good technology to provide secure communications. I'll get a little bit more into it later on. We build up a really strong suite of products and know-how and technology, backed up by our very big patent family. And in areas -- in order to deliver what I just told you, in areas like data science, in areas like how we layer security, how we deploy it both on-premise and cloud-based, how we created crowdsourcing to make our systems smarter as you use more of it. And finally, but not least -- final but not least, the developer SK -- the development SDK, the system -- the software development kit, sorry, and of course, high-performance API, this is the application interfaces. So this is how we could integrate other people's ecosystems into our platform. Our platform is based on the latest technology and philosophy of computing, the zero touch, zero trust, connectivity for 1 global community. So it's a network connectivity of a huge community. Sorry that took me a little longer to explain this slide. But I hope I give you an idea that we have base technology, base philosophy architecture, very strong patent portfolio and technology and know-how, and we know exactly what market we're going after. And the market is at least $38 billion in a TAM, total available market, that we could serve. And last but not least, we have the ambition to be a must-have product and a platform for IoT. So the -- so how do we do that? We have a good focus on the strategy, how do we do that? We develop a platform that is based on 3 very high-performance, well-established technology platform. One is in the secure communication. If you go to this slide and go to the bottom of this slide, it talks about secure communications. These are -- and I'll come -- I'll explain that a little bit more, but this is 1 platform that we have, the secure embedded operating system, which most of you know as QNX and the associated servicing technology, and that's for high safety capability. And then we build up on top of that, management security and service layer or how we manage and interact with different platforms, how we manage applications and deployment of applications. And I hope that, we could go through that a little bit. On the side there, we talk about cloud and mobile first. One of the really big things that BlackBerry stands out other than our safety heritage and the secure heritage and the privacy heritage is our cloud first and the mobile first. Obviously, you guys remember we have a huge cloud network with KNOX, but more importantly, we've been doing mobile computing in the last 30-some years. So we have a lot of know-how, a lot of patent portfolio supporting that. And then we put this platform together that basically pick out the best of what BlackBerry could have to offer and build a common platform. We submitted this architecture and set of platforms to an outside independent firm to assess our capability. And in a lot of different areas of threats and needs and complexity, we have been -- we went to Frost & Sullivan, who's been doing this reporting, of how each vendor, how much do they really cover in this whole IoT landscape, especially in the secure part of the world. You can see BlackBerry secured 96%-plus of all the enterprise threat landscape, obviously, this includes endpoints and communications. And this report actually literally just came out. And it came from Frost & Sullivan, and I think it just came out in the last month or 2. So when we approach customers with our offering, what problems are we trying to solve? So we look at this world of IoT and secure IoT world and cybersecurity world, we look at it, and there are 4 major problems that the industry and our customers and our prospects needs to address. First of all, I go from the left to right, thousands of vendors today, literally, everybody is saying the same thing about endpoints, about cloud, about cybersecurity, about threat prevention and so forth and so forth and so forth. A lot of them, obviously, are niche products, are single point products. Our work is -- our job and our focus is attempt to put as much of those together so that the customer could actually take advantage of a more integrated solution. So that's 1 area. And oh, by the way, this thousand vendors [ part ], and it's growing every year, represent a market opportunity of $173 billion today, and that number has been doubled -- more than doubled since 2015. The second bubble is the number of threats and attacks that the industry is seeing, that the world is seeing. Now with COVID-19, I think most of you have seen the latest FBI report that the attacks has gone up in leaps and bounds in terms of numbers. And -- but so the latest for this past quarter, January, February and March, we are seeing -- the industry is seeing 55 attacks plus per second. And this compare to a number of years ago, about 5 years ago, we're seeing about -- the industries were seeing about 39 -- every attack -- one -- every 39 seconds there was an attack. So you could see that the magnitude of growth is overwhelming. Then moving on to number of endpoints. Again, this endpoint is double every 5 years, and it doesn't seem to slow down anytime soon. And everybody wants to connect anything and everything together. And this will include all the new endpoints being built, new appliances being built, new devices being built, but also all the existing devices, all the LAN and server network, all the PC and everything else included. So you could see that every 5 years, you will see the double of the endpoints and it's probably going to accelerate. And then last but not least, maybe 5 years ago, when you asked the industries in general, 25% of the companies would tell you that they need more technology talents. Now the number has gone to 87%. Very few companies will ever tell you, they got every talent they need, they got all of the staff they need and so forth. So we believe that the next couple or 3 slides, to give you a -- the 3 base things that we put together and integrate will help solve most, if not all, these 4 problems that our customers are facing. Do you see this correctly, did I move it up? Too much? Bear with me for a second. Okay. So -- okay. First thing, as you could see on the upper right, I wanted to refer back to the block diagram and -- referring back to the block diagram that I laid out as our architecture, our platforms and how we connect everything together. So the first block diagram is, obviously, the product we call Spark, and we're extremely excited about our Spark platform. This is the integration of the UEM management, which is the Unified Endpoint Management, that manages both devices and application and the integration of that to the AI technology that we recently purchased -- acquired a company from -- a company called Cylance. They are a leader in AI and machine learning technology. So as you could see, that these are the basic 4 design principles of that platform and the integrated platform. A, you have the intelligent technology. And not to get into too much detail, we have an algorithm that manage the risk score of all users, endpoints, applications and transactions. And as I said earlier, when I made a comment about the more you use our software, the more you use our platform, the smarter your environment will get, and that really comes on the basis of the risk score and the evolution of the risk score and the tracking of that relevancy of the risk score. We talk about mobile and cloud first. Again, this is one of the strong suit of BlackBerry and from our heritage and understanding and the technology. Scalability. The scalability, if you recall, BlackBerry in the heyday of the of the cellphone business, if you recall that, you will find that we have a network that connects with about 665 telephone operators around the world in 175 countries. And we route literally 400 petabytes of data every year around the world, and obviously, over 100 million cellphones and endpoints talking to each other. So we have the know-how and the knowledge of the KNOX, of the network operating center, and the connectivity. So we believe we're very scalable in that sense. And by the way, we, today, address -- connect with over at least 500 million endpoints, and that number is actually probably slightly understated, but we will continue to grow on that, of course. Now last but not least is one solution. We want to simplify the world for our shareholders -- shareholders -- simplify the world for our stakeholders, which are mostly our customer, that we actually believe that management and security needs to be integrated. Today, there's a lot of vendors doing UEM endpoint management. There's a lot of vendors starting to get into the security side. We truly believe that the two should become together as one. And this is a benefit of, obviously, our customer there. The next platform pillar is our safety operating system environment. And not only safety operating system, we also own the technology and a company called Certicom, which is one of the key players in the cryptology world. And it passes out security certificates to enable things talk to each other that -- and safely and trustworthy. And so we're putting a lot of those design and partnerships into smart home. Obviously, the car, the today, connected car, the smart cars, the future, the autonomous driven car, and you know that we're very strong in that area. And then last, but not least, these all contribute to the smart city concept. Then this third pillar is the secure communication. We have at least 3 sets of products that were integrated to provide that environment and it goes across voice, texts, videos, file -- files and charts and all kinds of communications that the modern digital transformations needed. And the products are in crisis management software, or AtHoc. It's a life cycle management technology there. A lot of federal government or the United States federal government departments and agencies uses it. It's also -- we also have secure voice technology that the German government, for example, extensively used it and more governments are interested in using that. And last, but not least, our BBM Enterprise technology that does messaging -- day-to-day messaging in a secure and private environment, plus voice technology on top of that and video conferencing capability. And in this case, the Canadian government is actually running on BBM Enterprise every day, and they rely on us heavily. So those 3 are the basic building blocks of the entire architecture that will fulfill our ambition. And this is how we believe that we could compete and we could compete well, not only with the breadth of the product, but the more of the integrated capability of the product. So let me go down -- go to spend a few minutes on the performance we had and kind of the focus going forward. In the last year, last fiscal year, the total company annual revenue grow were 20%. We did forecast 23% to 25%. We grew 20% of the total revenue. We grew 26% in software and services. We did deliver -- managed to deliver double-digit software and services billing growth. This number we don't normally use, but I thought that for the purpose of today, if you recall in previous years, we just put a checkmark there. But I thought it might be meaningful to provide you that data. We actually grew our billings 19% last year. We delivered our positive EPS $0.13 non-GAAP. Before the -- before the lawyers get very excited, it says non-GAAP here, okay? And then we deliver positive free cash flow of $14 million. In looking back in the last 4 years, the compounded annual growth rate of our software has been at about 20%. And so we're pretty pleased with that number. We obviously want it to be higher than that, and we're working very hard to make it higher than that. And our gross margin also went from 5 years ago in FY '16, we're at about 46% as you can see that, we are trending up to the mid-70s now. And again, if you -- for the investor, they look at our [ IMS ] model, you will see that we have acceleration higher than this. The other accomplishment is more on the operational side. We talk about the Spark. The Spark is a combination, or the integration of the manage -- endpoint management and endpoint security. We integrated successfully all the finance product that makes the part of the Spark platform. We have expanded our patent portfolio. Now it's 38,000 patents, and it's very fresh patents. We continue to develop -- to invest in R&D and -- because we are -- we believe innovation and products are the most important long-lasting value. So we -- last year, we invested 24% of our revenue in R&D, and we launched at least 30, I think it's 38, major products in the entire year. By the way, this has been increased by 1 percentage point from a year ago. So -- and then we also are -- develop a number of managed service. Now the significant of managed service are usually the small, medium enterprise tend to favor the managed service technology because that will reduce their cost of deployment, and an ongoing basis -- the cost on an ongoing basis. Of course, for us, it's also a very good business model because it creates more recurring revenue and more predictable recurring revenue. Cloud-first, mobile-first, that's always something that our engineers and our people think about. Last but not least, we created a technology lab. There's at least over 100 engineers in that, and they create ideas about data lake, which is the crowdsourcing. They create how we integrate Cylance technology into the automotive environment or the world. So -- and how to create a much more secure Linux environment, knowing that it is full of loopholes and fault for people to exploit, example. And so those are not necessarily today's product. It might make it into tomorrow's product, it may actually make it into a new product as a whole. But we believe that BlackBerry needs to invest in more and more innovation and more and more technology. So I'm very pleased with that. It's up and running, and it's up and running for a year, and we've done a lot of good stuff, including, by the way, we demonstrated the QNX technology integrated with Cylance at CES last year and to predict certain fault conditions in a car, for example. Other accomplishments are more from the market side. If you follow our company, you -- a number of years ago, we always used to win 16 of the G20 government connected and protected, they are customers of ours. Last year was 17, and this year is now 18. We have over 175 million vehicles now connected with -- using QNX technology and that number was 150 last year. 77% of our Fortune 100 financial customers -- companies or customers are -- I think that's pretty -- that stayed pretty steady at 77%. And then over 0.5 billion endpoints connected and protected. Again, this number is actually a lower number than we actually counted. So we're making progress in all the right areas. So as a result, Gartner Group, IDC, these are leading independent industry analysts that follow the industry and compare all the vendors and the providers, have given us high marks in what we do. And the latest good news is there is an industry standard test called the MITRE test. And it really evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of tracking threats and the number of configurations you have to change and to order to do that. It's a very elaborative report, and I would suggest and everybody interested in that should go get a report to look at. And you will find quickly that BlackBerry scored extremely well, especially in the EDR side, which a lot of people rank us lower than other industry players. But this is now proof that our EDR product is up to the world-class and could compete extremely well. And you will see us be more aggressive. I think -- I put out some social media, I guess, notes, and I think I have reasonable response to that. Finally, what are we focusing this year? If I take a step back, I believe we're definitely in the right market. The market is definitely growing. We have a very focused way to create value, a good ambition, a good strategy and a really great set of products. So the one thing that you all have heard me said time after time is that I got to do better in the go-to-market. And so we can -- we're going to continue working and improving ourselves in that. We're going to make -- we made some good progress in the last year, and we'll continue to focus on making more -- better progress so that we could see -- what we'd like to do is to make sure that we have a predicted growth -- predictable growth going forward in this market that we could gain market share. And we will do that. And hopefully, it's not too long from now. I wanted to let everybody know that this year, we're going to focus on sales and marketing. On the sales front, leadership recruitment. We have a good set of leaders. We're going to add to that. One of the good adds to the leadership is Tom Eacobacci. He ran Americas for Cisco -- not Cisco but Citrix. Sorry. Sorry, Tom. Don't mean to -- and from Citrix. And Citrix sells to the right -- services the right, the same kind of customers and using the same type of products and go-to-market that BlackBerry uses. And so he's very relevant to help me and help us to build a much more robust go-to-market system. We unified the go-to-market. We're really integrating as many of our different groups into one, and you'll continue to see that. And Tom is -- one of his mission is to do so. You might be noticing that in the last year, we've been focusing a lot of partnership announcement, but not just partnership with, "Hey, you sell this and you sell." We have very deep relationship with some of this, and we've been very careful. So I will call that we will rather have a good, smaller number, but much deeper relationship and much more broader relationship with that. Bosch, for example -- I just name a very few of them. Bosch, of course, we're developing a joint product set of AUTOSAR in the auto space with QNX driving. AWS, across the board, running UEM and offering UEM on the cloud and also working on all those things together. Verizon's managed service for -- for Cylance-type products, so cybersecurity product, and we'll expand that. Then we just announced a reseller agreement to their enterprise space with us on the Mobile Threat Defense, the MTD product. And CACI is our representative in the United States government or the federal government on secure voice technology, and they will be standing up a FedRAMP-enabled platform to do that for us. Intel, we just announced recently also a joint effort on crypto mining and anti-ransomware. So we expect all of these will bring in good -- hopefully good source of revenue into a good product in the good go-to-market initiative. We plan to expand professional services. We separated our farming units and our funding units, the new logo versus the renewal team. And then we also created a customer success team that focus on the top 30 accounts and making sure that we do everything we can to service our top accounts and -- including helping them to troubleshoot their environment that even was not because of BlackBerry's problem. On the marketing front, you see more -- you will see more and more activities and investment in brand marketing, in product marketing, in field marketing. We're creating teams of people to do that now. Unified channel marketing, threat intelligence leadership. You see us publish those information more often now. And last, but not least, we started a government relations and public policy office. I think this should help us grow our federal business, not only the United States, in Canada as well as in the EU countries. At least that's the focus for this coming year. So with that, that concludes my prepared remarks for today. And so is there any particular questions that may have been submitted?

John, just before we move there...

Yes, I need you to tell everybody what the procedures of this.

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] We'll now give attendees a moment to type in any additional questions. Before answering, we'll read out or summarize the question and read the name of the person who asked it, and if applicable, the entity that's represented. John, I'll take the first question. [ Mr. Dorsey Gardner ] I spoke of before, is in attendance online and has submitted questions. Much of the subject matter of the questions has already been addressed in my earlier remarks. However, on a different note, here and previously, [ Mr. Gardner ] has expressed his concern about Fairfax or another party bidding for the company at a lowball price, while its stock is impacted by COVID-19. He's asked why the Board has not taken defensive measures such as approving a rights plan or a poison pill to provide additional time for alternatives to emerge. [ Mr. Gardner ] is a U.S. investor. Under current takeover bid rules here in Canada, regulators are unlikely to permit a target company to maintain a poison pill to buy time beyond the minimum bid period of at least 105 days. What that means is that rights plans are of limited value in Canada. And our Board has considered this and the nature of our shareholder base in its evaluations from time to time of available defenses. Also, I would like to note that the company's stock price has recovered by more than 88% already from its 52-week low in March.

Thank you, Phil. I actually find out that there's no more questions.

Just on that John, I'd like to say it appears we may have had an issue with control numbers and some folks did want to ask a question or 2. Please accept our sincere apologies. Like so many other things in this COVID era, we are, too, are adapting to some new procedures here at this meeting. And we hope to do better with this with some practice. So our apologies if you had a question but had some trouble with your control number for this purpose.

But would they eventually be able to submit their questions?

We will do our best to find a way.

Okay. All right. And if you do -- again, I also apologize if we have a glitch in the system and if we -- and we'll get better over the years. And if you do have a questions, Phil will find a way to reach out, and then we'll make sure that we answer the question through e-mail or a written form or such. Okay. Well, with that situation, and with that unable to see any more questions, I would like to declare this -- the meetings -- that this ends the meeting today. I would like to thank everybody for attending. We look forward to welcome you again at our next year's meeting. And I wish all of you safe and healthy. Thank you very much.

This concludes today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines. Thank you for participating and have a pleasant day.