Tech companies that desperately need a Secret Santa in 2016!

By Sonal Vats

Christmas is ringing in and we all have our wish list ready for Santa. For many tech companies like Niantic, Microsoft, Amazon, 2016 gave them their fair share of highs while for others like Twitter, Blackberry and Xiaomi, there’s much they would like to forget and wish Santa to bring them luck with better growth and improved sales.

Here’s the list of tech companies who desperately need a secret Santa this Christmas.

Twitter

From plateaued user growth to failure to curb online abuse to executive exodus, nothing seemed to be going right for Twitter in 2016. The micro-blogging site is in dire need of a secret Santa to bail it out of its current troubles. May be some good buyer!

After the departure of COO Adam Bain, Twitter recently also lost its chief technology officer Adam Messinger and VP of Product Josh McFarland. A similar screenplay is happening at other regional offices, including India. The company has lost over 50 percent of its value over the past three years.

Twitter had also been in talks with various companies for a possible stake sale but nothing materialized. The exodus has been accentuated by various rounds of lay-offs too.

Though Jack Dorsey’s team introduced many new features to the platform to enhance its user-friendliness, and to fight hate speech, looks like, Twitter will need a complete reversal of fortune to be back in competition with the likes of Facebook and Snapchat.

BlackBerry

After failure of Priv, BlackBerry announced DTEK 50 in July touted as “the world’s most secure Android smartphone.” The phone with Alcatel hardware and Android brain modified to include BlackBerry’s end-to-end security solution hasn’t been able to turn the fortunes of this former smartphone giant that currently has less than one percent of market share in smartphone segment.

BlackBerry then called it quits for hardware designing completely in September announcing that it will no longer make the hardware for its smartphones and instead focus on its software and enterprises services.

The smartphone maker that once enjoyed almost 40 percent share of the US market badly needs Santa presently to thrive in the smartphone segment.

Xiaomi

Despite some successful launches like Mi Mix, Chinese company Xiaomi doesn’t seem to be doing very well with a series of losses on its balance sheet.

Xiaomi was valued at $46 billion in its last funding round in 2014. However, in 2015, it missed its smartphone target by a substantial 12 percent, and its third quarter, this year too, saw a significant 45 percent drop in China smartphone sales, stoking doubts if the valuation is still warranted.

Theranos

Once a poster boy of the startup community, Theranos has been hit with a barrage of regulatory scrutiny and investigations surrounding its controversial "finger-prick" blood testing technology.

In July this year, the company was banned from operating blood-testing labs for two years by federal regulators who also fined the company and revoked the regulatory approval for its lab in Newark, California.

If that wasn’t enough, late last month, an early investors filed lawsuit alleging that the company made false and misleading claims about its technology and operations to get funding. The company is also being investigated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Valued at about $9 billion in 2014, it was valued by Forbes at about $800 million in June this year.

Lets hope this Christmas, Santa resolves some of these issues for founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes.

Yahoo

After sailing in rough waters for years, when Verizon announced plans to buy the troubled internet company for $4.8 billion, it looked as if Yahoo will finally get an anchor. But, as it happened, it was the lull before the storm.

Within a span of three months, Yahoo acknowledged two data breaches- 2014 breach affecting 500 million user accounts and the other involving more than 1 billion user accounts in 2013.

The incidents have raised questions regarding the viability of the Verizon deal and whether the valuation will need to be changed, especially if the hacks trigger litigation against the company.

Ringing Bells, Freedom 251

When Noida based Ringing Bells Pvt Ltd announced the world’s cheapest smartphone at Rs 251, it became national and global news-headline.

The company received humongous — over 70 million — registrations before its payment gateway crashed.

But after announcing that it delivered 5,000 Freedom 251 smartphones in July, the promise of delivering “nearly 200,000 Freedom 251 handsets” seems to have disappeared in thin air as no new numbers have been shared since July and it appears the initial hype has fizzled out.

According to Faisal Kawoosa, Principal Analyst (Telecoms) at CyberMedia Research (CMR), “I think we could have called it the biggest disappointment only if there had been great expectations attached to it. Every educated person, or those having fair understanding of technology, doubted it. Some may have booked one just out of curiosity but that never meant they took it seriously.”

“I wouldn’t call it biggest tech disappointment. But yes, it could be looked at as one of the biggest cheats in the digital age,” he added.