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BlackBerry Ltd. has hired a new sales executive for its global mobile-device business in its latest move to revive the struggling operation.

BlackBerry is bolstering its sales team to establish more direct relationships with corporate and other enterprise customers to help generate new business, said Alex Thurber, who is joining the Canadian technology company as senior vice president for global device sales.

Mr. Thurber will oversee BlackBerry's in-house sales teams as well as its efforts to generate additional revenue from distributing devices through carriers and other partners.

"My focus is to achieve BlackBerry's strategic priority in making the device business profitable," Mr. Thurber said in an email.

The hiring reaffirms BlackBerry's commitment to its device business even as the division shrinks. At the same time, it underscores the challenges in turning around that operation amid stiff competition from larger rivals Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co.

BlackBerry will be looking to draw on Mr. Thurber's track record of success as head of world-wide sales at WatchGuard Technologies Inc., a private Seattle-based developer of security firewall technology. The executive said that during his tenure of just over 2½ years, WatchGuard went from declining revenue to six straight quarters of year-over-year growth.

BlackBerry is largely betting on sales of higher-margin secure software and services used by government and business to manage their mobile networks to fuel its turnaround. It wants to augment that push by offering handsets that foster worker productivity while emphasizing security.

Earlier in April, BlackBerry showed that its focus is paying off as sales from software and services more than doubled in its latest quarter to $153 million from a year earlier. By contrast, its smartphone operation continued to struggle despite the November launch of the Priv, BlackBerry's first-ever Android-powered phone. That smartphone is meant to appeal to a broader audience by incorporating the security features of BlackBerry's older phones with the social media and entertainment apps available through the Google Play store.

Still, in its fourth quarter ended Feb. 29, handset sales disappointed. It recognized revenue on 600,000 smartphones, down from 700,000 in the third quarter, which the company blamed in part on slowing demand for high-end smartphones. BlackBerry plans to release two new, lower-priced Android phones this year.

Write to Ben Dummett at ben.dummett@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 27, 2016 15:05 ET (19:05 GMT)

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