BlackBerry Stock Sneaking Up on a New 52-Week High

Last Thursday, BlackBerry announced that it has agreed to sell an R&D facility in Germany to Volkswagen for an undisclosed sum. Along with the plant, VW will get 200 BlackBerry employees who will join Volkswagen Infotainment, the company VW has established to develop technologies for managing in-car information and entertainment systems.

The health care product in India uses BlackBerry’s QNX platform to provide secure cloud-based data management for the data collection and integrated payment system offered by NantHealth.

The company’s Blackberry 10 operating system is built on QNX, a software platform acquired in 2010. The first product based on QNX was the ill-fated Playbook tablet, but the company has licensed QNX to companies as diverse as Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO), General Electric Co. (NYSE: GE) and Caterpillar Inc. (NYSE: CAT), which are developing or have developed machine-to-machine applications on the platform.

QNX also commands 53% of the market for automobile infotainment systems and is used by Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F), Mercedes-Benz, Audi and BMW. Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) also uses QNX in its CarPlay platform.

What BlackBerry hopes eventually to do in India is connect a variety of medical devices and hospital information systems with NantHealth’s Clinical Operating System (cOS) and the QNX platform. The NantHealth cOS is currently installed at about 250 hospitals around the world and connects more than 16,000 medical devices that collect more than 3 billion vital signs a year from patients.

The company’s stock traded at $11.18 in the late morning Monday, up about 5.5%, in a 52-week range of $5.44 to $12.18. Volume was very heavy, at 18.5 million shares already changing hands, compared with a daily average of about 13 million.

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