The numbers are in and they don’t look good. According to the company, they shipped 14.1 million BlackBerrys and 150,000 PlayBooks. Keep in mind, those are shipped numbers, not sold.
Net income for the quarter was $265 million, compared with net income of $911 million in the same quarter last year. Adjusted net income for the third quarter was $667 million, according to RIM.
“Despite the challenges faced in the third quarter, the BlackBerry subscriber base grew to almost 75 million customers around the world. In addition, RIM launched a range of new BlackBerry 7 based smartphones globally and introduced holiday promotions that helped drive growth in the installed base of BlackBerry PlayBook users,” said Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, Co-CEOs at Research In Motion. “RIM continues to have strong technology, unique service capabilities and a large installed base of customers, and we are more determined than ever to capitalize on our strengths to overcome the recent execution challenges surrounding product launches and the resulting financial performance.”
Who are they kidding?
Shareholders ?
Only 150K Playbooks shipped even with their fire-sale prices? Yikes. HP’s TouchPad flew off the shelves, but even at discount prices RIM can’t sell their tablets.
Judging from their after-hours stock performance, no, not them either.
Shipped to whom, a company that makes doorstops?
Shipped to whom, a company that repurposes them into doorstops?
Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie are fooling each other. That’s about it.
These guys make the Apple CEO’s of the late 80’s and 90’s look like geniuses.
Just a thought
Honestly, it’s not all that funny. In this poor economy it appears there’s going to be plenty of layoffs at RIM and it’s the lowly employees that are going to get the shaft because of upper management’s poor judgment of the smartphone market. And this comes at a time when smartphone sales are practically going through the roof. RIM had a really decent head-start and they let it slip through their fingers. It’s become a two-horse race between iOS and a couple of Android smartphone vendors and it almost appears that there’s no more room for any other OSes to flourish at this point.
In 2008, RIM was the darling of Wall Street and all the analysts were betting that RIM would maintain a healthy lead for the next five years or so being so important to the enterprise and starting to attract the mainstream consumer. They held on for about 2.5 years and then disaster struck as they could make the transition to touch-screen smartphones. The industry changed and they couldn’t keep up. Pretty scary if you ask me. It wasn’t the iPhone that did them in, it was the market flooded with cheap Android smartphones. Blame Google for that.
You’re being unfair here. No doubt it wasn’t the iPhone that did them in, but it also wasn’t the cheap Android smartphones.
RIM’s problem is they created something (reasonably) great and sat on it for years, only realizing they needed to continue to advance later. At that point, they just started throwing half-baked products over the wall.
If you threw in a corporate split, you’d have the same story as Palm from 2002-2008.
RIM is dying because of their own incompetence and lack of vision.
No, it’s not funny if you think about the employees. And decent people will empathize, particularly unemployed people like me.
But I have nothing but contempt for the overpaid meatheads at the top (who still very likely retain enormous non-cash compensation) who insisted that their entire company (and its shareholders) buy into their collective arrogant delusions.
And with that contempt, there is opportunity for satire. Because that is the only weapon the rest of us have to take down people who can still buy and sell any of us in a heartbeat.
I’m surprised that RIM’s demise is coming so much sooner than I thought! I thought it would be at least 2-3 years before they approach the “danger-zone”. Now it looks like they’ll be pretty much “done” in a year. Only a really poorly managed company will buy this “falling-knife”, so expect Microsoft, Google, Sony or HP to show interest. The vultures are swarming, waiting for RIM’s share-price to fall below $10. Once that happens, the recent “negative” news they’ve been getting will seem nice compared to what’s coming their way! I see these CEO’s getting ousted by the end of February. Another missed release date & they’re toast!