There is no place to hide in the brutally competitive smartphone market. BlackBerry always faced a hard challenge to claw back market share, but has ultimately been let down by a make-or-break revamp of its touchscreen devices that met with mixed reviews and poor initial sales.

A plea by chief executive Thorsten Heins at the company’s annual meeting in July to give the group more time fell on deaf ears among a long-suffering investor base. The group’s share price has sunk nearly 38 per cent in the past three months, leaving its equity valued at just $5.3bn.

As recently as three years ago, BlackBerry (then called Research In Motion) was worth more than $41bn and was considered to be Canada’s flagship technology company, following the bankruptcy of Nortel Networks.