John S. Chen

John S. Chen (; born July 1, 1955 ) is a Hong Kong-American businessman who served as executive chairman and chief executive officer of BlackBerry Ltd. Previously, he served as the chief executive officer and president of Sybase, a software vendor specializing in data management, analytics and mobility technology.

Chen has also served on the boards of Walt Disney Company and Wells Fargo & Company Chen traces his ancestral origin to Wuxi, Jiangsu. His family migrated from Shanghai during the Chinese civil war. Chen studied at La Salle College in Hong Kong until Form 5, before going to the United States and graduating from Northfield Mount Hermon School, a preparatory school in Northfield, Massachusetts. He went on to graduate from Brown University in 1978 with a B.S., magna cum laude in electrical engineering, and in 1979, with an M.S. in electrical engineering from Caltech.

Career Chen began his career in 1979 as a design engineer with Unisys, where he eventually served as vice president and general manager of, in turn, the Convergent RISC Platform Division and the Convergent UNIX Systems Group. In 1991 he joined Pyramid Technology Corporation as executive vice president. Chen was elected president, chief operating officer and a director of Pyramid in 1993, serving until 1995.

Sybase Chen became CEO of Sybase in 1998. As John Gallant and Eric Knorr noted in IT World, Sybase had been a strong competitor of Oracle, but had become a "dead company" after failing to enter the market for enterprise applications, as Oracle had. Chen and his team proceeded to reinvent Sybase as an "enabler of the 'unwired enterprise'". valued at CAD$6 billion in 2010. Sybase achieved strong financial performance and shareholder returns under Chen's leadership, including 55 consecutive quarters of profitability,

BlackBerry, board and trustee appointments Chen was appointed executive chairman of the board and CEO of BlackBerry Ltd in November 2013, He has credited himself with the saving and turnaround of BlackBerry.

On October 30, 2023, John S. Chen announced his resignation set for November 4, 2023, as Blackberry Limited CEO. He wrote a letter to employees of BlackBerry Limited announcing the departure.

He served as a director on the board of the Walt Disney Company

He has served on the boards of CIT Group and High tech startups such as Beyond.com, Niku Corporation, Wafer Technology, and Turbolinux US. and as co-chair of the Secure Borders and Open Doors Advisory Committee. He has testified before Congress on U.S.-China trade relations.

He serves as a trustee of the Brookings Institution, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

The Brown University School of Engineering awarded Chen its Brown Engineering Alumni Medal (BEAM) in 2003.

In July 2007, Sybase announced that Chen, its CEO, had been awarded the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year for Northern California.

Chen has also received awards from the US-Asia Institute (2009), the U.S.-China Policy Foundation,

As of 2016, Chen was a trustee of Caltech and of the charitable organisation, The First Tee, and a governor of the San Francisco Symphony.