John Chen: We Believe We Could Monetize BBM To About $100 Million For The Fiscal Year

BlackBerry Ltd BBRY had a busy day on Wednesday as the company came out with two back to back announcements. One being AT&T will now sell Blackberry’s Classic phone along with redesigned Passport and the other being integration of BBM to support wearable technology.

Blackberry’s CEO, John Chen, was on CNBC Wednesday to discuss those two new announcements.

 “The demand [for the Classic] looks pretty good. I need to work on the distribution and the AT&T announcement this morning has helped us a lot tremendously about getting phones to the consumers and getting phones to the enterprise users,” Chen said.

When asked about how the company is planning to monetize BBM, Chen answered, “We laid out a little bit of why we believe we could monetize the business to about a $100 million for the fiscal year, next fiscal year starting March and we went through a roadmap this morning with the group and a lot of them has to deal with increasing it not only to MAU, which is the monthly active users”

He continued, “So we have two ways to monetize it, in the area of the wearable is to try to make that experience of BBM much more stickier and…we not only want to expand the MAU through this process, but we are also going to make it a little bit more sticky and spend more time [with us]. In addition to that, we are going to talk more about our payment system through using BBM,”