AGM 2020

Jun 23, 2020

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the BlackBerry Annual and Special Meeting of the Shareholders. As a reminder, all participants are in listen only mode and 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 challenges and uncertainties of the COVID-nineteen and mitigate risks to the health and safety of the company's shareholders, employees and other stakeholders we decided to hold our 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 non registered 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 procedures for all this in just a moment. With that said, it is my pleasure to introduce a member of the company's Board of Directors who are in attendance on this webcast today, Mike Daniels, Tim Detels, Dick Lynch, Laurie Swarden Alsop, Barbara Steinmetz, Pam Watzer and Wayne Waters. 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 Conference 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 now like to turn this meeting to call this meeting to order, sorry. And as Chair, I will ask Phil Curtis to add as secretary to 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. Questions in respective items of business at the meeting could be submitted by any registered shareholder or duly appointed proxy holder using the instant messaging service of the virtual interface. Questions will only be taken from shareholders and their proxies. Please note that there will be a slight delay between the time a question Generally, questions will be addressed only during the Q and A session after the formal part of the meeting. However, questions regarding procedural matters or that are directly related to an item of business may be addressed during the formal part of the meeting. 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 votes. You'll 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 Peanut 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 scrutineers preliminary report stating that a quorum of shareholders is in attendance. The scrutineers report shows that there are shareholders or proxy holders in attendance on this live webcast today, holding 332,000,000 975,053 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 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 Detels, Lisa Disbrow, Richard Lynch, Laurie Smalldoin Alsop, Barbara Stymest, Prem Watsa and Wayne Waters. Bylaw No. A-four 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 with 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 Pricewaterhouse House Coopers 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 12,000,000 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 interests 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 6,000,000 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 deductions. 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 non binding 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 non binding 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 had 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 stay 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-nineteen. He believes that the Board should implement defensive measures such as a shareholder rights plan. Mr. Gardner has also expressed his view that Premwassa should not be a member of our Board because of conflicts of interest related to Fairfax's investment in the company and because of the 2019 court decision regarding the acquisition of Fibreq by Resolute Forest Products 9 years ago. Mr. Gardner believes that the court's commentary in the Fibreq decision disqualifies Mr. Watza 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. Watza as the 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. Waza 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. Watza first joined the company's Board more than 8 years ago. During our strategic review process in 2013, Mr. Watza 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 Fibreq decision, that was a case about the fair value of shares held by dissenting shareholders when Fibreq was acquired by Resolute. Mr. Wattsa and Fairfax were not parties to the litigation nor were they subject to the order of the court. Mr. Watts' relationship to FIBREC in 2011 is easily distinguishable from his relationship with BlackBerry today, particularly because he never served as the director of FIBREC. 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 a conflict interest on Mr. Watts' part. Our proxy disclosures relating to Mr. Watts' 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 open to registered shareholders and appointed proxy holders. Polls are now open. And at this point, all registered shareholders and proxy holders who have properly logged in with their control numbers or username and wish to vote we'll 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. Once the balloting closes, the voting page will disappear, and your votes will be submitted automatically. The scrutineers have compiled and provided to me with a preliminary report of the balance. 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 a frequency of 1 year for the advisory say and pay vote. Detailed voting results will be published on SEDAR and EDGAR 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 and 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 are adopting for this presentation the cautionary language regarding forward looking statements that is set out in the company's annual report on Form 10 ks, 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 public 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 valued. And however, I also wanted to take this opportunity to let all the shareholders know that not only are 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 it out some of the reason of why we're very bullish and we are committed to executing 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 about only about 2 weeks ago. And I thought this is a slide that is a lot better than the traditional mission slide, vision slide, the way people like to put together. And those of course are still useful. But I like to be a little bit more specific on not only about what our ambitions are and how we believed 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 promised you the rest of the slide 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, manage, connect and integrate, not only with our software, but with the entire open system ecosystem. And just so I amend 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 will 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 product. So who are we concentrating on? Who our customer base will concentrate on? The first customer base is people that require high security and mobility management. And these typically are regulated industry, which implied they are industrial, they're in financial, like banking, they're in government, and they're healthcare. Then also that the customers that have strong interest in the digital transformation and every company at various degrees are 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 are in a smart home, whether they are 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 $38,000,000,000 market opportunity. And the way we get at it is to provide safety certified API, to provide good technology for managing end points 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 back up our very big pads and family. And in areas in order to deliver what I just told you, in areas like data science, in area like how we layer security, how we deploy it both on premise and cloud based, how we created crowdsourcing to make the to make our system smarter as you use more of it. And finally, but not least, final but not least, but the developer SDK, the development SDK, the system the software development case, sorry, and of course, high performance API. This is the application interfaces. So this is how we could integrate other people ecosystems into our platform. Our platform is based on the latest technology and philosophy of computing, the 0 touch, 0 trust and 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 it gives 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 $38,000,000,000 in a TAM total available market that we could share we could serve. And last but not least, we have the ambition to be a must have product and a platform for IoT. 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. 1 is in the secure communication. If you go to this slide and go to the bottom of the slide, it talks about secure communications. These are I'll explain that a little bit more, but this is one platform that we have. Then the secure embedded operating system, which most of you noted as QNX and the associated surfacing technology, And that's for high safety capability. And then we build up on Televent 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. You know 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, it's 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 portfolios 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 a 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 Forrest and 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. If you can see BlackBerry secure 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 and Sullivan and I think it's came on 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 in cybersecurity world, we look at it and there are 4 major problems that the industry and our customers and our prospects needs to address. 1st 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 product, single point product. 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 one area. And by the way, this 1,000 vendors plus and is growing every year represent a market opportunity of $173,000,000,000 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-nineteen, I think most of you have seen the latest report that the attack has gone up in leaps and bounds in terms of numbers. And so the latest for this past quarter, January, February March, we are seeing the industry is seeing 55 attack plus per second. And in this compare to a number of years ago, about 5 years ago, we've seen about the industries are seeing about 39 every attack one every 39 second, there was an attack. So you could see the magnitude of growth is overwhelming. Then moving on the 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're going to 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 company 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 the staff they need and so forth. So we believe that the next couple of 3 slides to give you the 3 base things that we put together and integrate will help solve most, if not all these small problems that our customers are facing. Did everybody see this correctly? Did I move it up too much? Bear with me for a second, Okay. First thing, as you could see on the upper right, I wanted to refer back to the block diagram. And we were referring back to the block diagram that I laid out as our architectural platforms and how we connect everything together. So the first ROC diagram is obviously the product we call Spark and we're extremely excited about our Slack platform. This is the integration of the UEM management, which is the unified endpoint management that manage 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 can see that these are the basic four design principle of that platform and in the integrated platform. A, you have the intelligence 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, I want to make 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 this 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 growth. Again, this is one of the strong suits of BlackBerry and from our heritage and understanding and the technology. Scalability, the scalability, if you recall, BlackBerry in the heyday of the cell phone business, if you recall that, you will find that we have a network that connect with about 6 65 telephone operators around the world in 175 countries. And we route literally 400 petabytes of data every year around the world and obviously over 100,000,000 cell phones and endpoints talking to each other. So we have the know how and the knowledge of the NOx, 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 connected over at least 500,000,000 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, our shareholders, the simplified world for our stakeholders, which are mostly our customer, that we actually believe that management and security needs to be integrated. TJ, 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 2 should be come together as 1. 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 the 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, today connected car, the smart car, 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 3rd 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, text, video, file, fileless and charts and all kinds of communications that the modern digital transformations needed. And the products are in crisis management software or ad hoc, it's a lifecycle management technology there. Lot of federal government or the United States Federal Government Department and Agency uses it. It's also we also have secure voice technology that the German government, for example, extensively used it and more government 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 DBM Enterprise every day and they rely on us heavily. So those 3 are the basic building block 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 growth 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 and manage the 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 check mark 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, dollars 0.13 non GAAP before the lawyers get very excited. It says non GAAP here. Okay. And we delivered positive free cash flows of $14,000,000 Looking back at 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 on the FY 'sixteen, 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 that look at our timeless model, you will see that we have acceleration higher than this. The other accomplishment is more on the operational side. We talk about Spark. The Spark is a combination of the integration of the management the endpoint management and endpoint security. We integrated successfully all the Cylance product that makes it 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 and D and because we believe innovation and product are the most important long lasting value. So we last year, we invested 24% of our revenue in R and 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 developed a number of managed service. Now, the significant of managed service are usually the small, medium enterprise tend to favor the managed service technology and because that will reduce their cost of deployment and in an ongoing basis, the cost of 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. CloudCoast, 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 a cloud sourcing. They've created how we integrate Cylance technology into the automotive environment of the world. So and how to create a much more secure Linux environment, knowing that it is through 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 might 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. It's been 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 the car, for example. Other accomplishments are more from the market side. If you follow our company, a number of years ago, we all used the word 16 of the G20 government connected and protected their customers of ours. Last year was 17 and this year is now 18. We have over 175,000,000 vehicles now connected using QNX technology, and that number was 150 last year. 77% of our Fortune 100 Financial customers companies or customers, I think that's pretty that stayed pretty steady at 77%. And then over 500,000,000 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. As a result, Gardner Group, IDC, these are leading independent industry analysts that follow the industry and compare all the vendors and the provider and give us high marks in what we do. And the latest good news is there's an industry standard test called a MITRE test, and it really evaluates the efficiency and the effectiveness of tracking threats and the number of configuration you have to change and do all of you do that. That's a very elaborate 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 score extremely well, especially in the EDL 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 being 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 continue working and improving ourselves in that. We can 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 predictive 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 had a good set of leaders, we're going to add to that. 1 of the good add to the leadership is Tom Ecobodgsy. He runs Americas for Cisco not Cisco, but Citrix, sorry, Tom, told me to yes, and from Citrix. And Citrix sells to the right service, the right, the same kind of customers and using the same type of products and go to market that BlackBerry uses. And so, it's very relevant to help me and help us to build a much more robust go to market systems. We unify the go to market. We're really integrating as many of our different groups into 1, and you will 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 of, 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 the a good smaller number, but much deeper relationship and much more broader relationship with that. Bosch, for example, I'll 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 Cylance type products, so cybersecurity product, and we'll expand that. Dowie just announced a reseller agreement to their enterprise space with us on the Mobile Threat Defense, the MTT product. And Kaki 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 these will bring in good hopefully, good source of revenue into a good product, into a 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 focused 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 relation and public policy office. I think this should help us grow our federal business, not only in 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 be submitted? John, just before we move there. Yes, I need you to tell everybody what the procedures of this. Thank you. We will now address questions submitted by shareholders and their proxies in attendance on the webcast. Shareholders and their proxies who would like to submit a question are asked to use the instant messaging feature of the virtual interface to do so. When submitting your question, please include your name and the entity you represent, if any, and limit your questions to topics relating to today's subject matter, and please keep your questions brief. We may be unable to address all questions, but we will endeavor to respond to any unanswered questions by e mail in due course after the meeting. 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 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 low ball price while its stock is impacted by COVID-nineteen. 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 our 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 there's no more questions. 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 area, 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 will they eventually be able to submit that question? We will do our best to find a way. Okay. All right. Thank you. And if you do again, I also apologize if we have a glitch on the system. And if we and we'll get better over the years. And if you do have questions, Phil will find a way to reach out and then we'll make sure that we answer the question through email or a written form of sorts. Okay. Well, with that situation and with that unable to see there any more questions, I would like to declare this, the meetings and 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.