TECH-INFO-FIRST

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. Navy are two massive federal agencies.  The FBI has over 35,000 active employees ; the Navy has 54,000+ officers .  What do all of those government employees have in common?  Most of them carry government-purchased smartphones from Canada's BlackBerry Ltd. 

But Reuters and The Wall Street Journal are reporting that Samsung Electronics Comp., Ltd. (KSC:005930) is on the verge of signing new contracts that would break BlackBerry's exclusivity as smartphone supplier to these agencies.

The deal would be a massive victory for the world's largest smartphone maker, which has been lobbying the U.S. government hard to adopt its Galaxy S IV smartphones.  And it would be opportune timing given Samsung's growth had started to slow on a market-wide stagnation of smartphone sales.

At the same time, the deal would be a big blow financially to BlackBerry – a company whose future already looks uncertain given the slow sales of its tardy BlackBerry 10 platform.

BlackBerry 10 (BB10) -- originally scheduled for a H1 2012 launch -- was delayed a year, finally seeing a soft launch in January.  The first BB10 devices hit the U.S. in March, but the most popular variety of Blackberries -- keyboard equipped models -- were delayed even further, only starting to sell in May in the U.S.


That sluggish rollout may have been the last straw for more than one government agency that is losing faith that keeping BlackBerry exclusive is a wise logistics choice.  In May the Pentagon approved for the first time the use of Samsung and Apple, Inc. (AAPL) smartphones by the branches of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD).