The BlackBerry phone makers have not seen profits in years. The company may stop making their smartphones in order to curb further loses.

This week, CEO John Chen said that he is determined to reverse the company's current misery. All one has to do is look at the profits and observe the types of BB phones that have been selling in order to understand the necessity.

"If I cannot make money on handsets, I will not be in the handset business," Chen said according to The Wall Street Journal.

Chen later denied that the company has any plans of exiting the handset business. He claimed that his comments were taken out of context.

BlackBerry's technology is sometimes considered "ancient" because it is still using a BB7 operating system. The BB7 still manages to outsell the BB10. In the third quarter of 2013, one million BB10 devices were sold, but consumers bought five million of BlackBerry's new Bolds and Curves, the Metro Weekly reports. In that same year, BlackBerry's cash reserves fell from $3.2 billion to $2.7 billion since the third quarter, although it sold just 1.3 million smartphones over that quarter. Nokia, which runs on third-place OS Windows Phone, sold 8.2 million Lumia smartphones in the last three months of 2013.

What is also affecting BlackBerry's profits are its recently broken ties with T-Mobile. This angered the company so much that they encouraged customers to trade in BlackBerry handsets for a newer device. BlackBerry cannot afford to have any less retail avenues for its devices.

Windows, Apple, and Samsung are just some of the companies that consumers are gravitating toward rather than BlackBerry's now fancy keyboard phones. Chen intends to have BlackBerry slowly come off its dependency on device sales, which the company thinks makes it profitable.

"I don't have a plan to get rid of handsets, I have a plan to not be dependent on handsets," Chen said, while speaking to reporters at Bloomberg's headquarters. "All I need to do is replace the handset revenue, and this company will be very different."

"[Chen intends to focus the company's] QNX operating system and its BBM instant-messaging service," The Metro Weekly reports. "BlackBerry purchased QNX in 2010 and, after a failed attempt to use it on tablet devices with the BlackBerry Playbook, it found a lucrative revenue stream licensing it out to car manufacturers and industrial settings for use on computers and devices."

Chen believes that device interaction is the future for devices like his.

In December, Chen made a deal with Foxconn, the world's largest market of electronic parts and an Apple supplier that made headlines for labor violations in China, to develop and manufacture certain BlackBerry devices, NBC News reported.

Related