“Shares of RIM have tumbled almost 30 percent since late September as analysts downgraded the stock,” Dabrowski reports. “Their concern is that an invasion of new smartphones from the likes of Apple and Nokia will erode the BlackBerry’s dominance as North America’s top selling smartphone brand.”
MacDailyNews Take: Nokia? LOL. Otherwise, the anaylsts’ concerns are well-founded.
Dabrowski reports, “RIM’s co-chief executives say the company has weathered similar storms in the past… ‘When we went public everyone was saying, ‘Oh my God, you’re going to get crushed by Motorola, Ericsson and paging and this emerging Nokia,” said Jim Balsillie, one of RIM’s co-CEOs… This has played before, several times. All that’s different is there’s a couple more zeros on everything.”
“Worldwide, Nokia is the top smartphone maker, according to Gartner data, with a 39.3 percent market share. RIM, which employs more than 13,000 people around the world, is second with share of 20.8 percent. Apple is third with 17.1 percent,” Dabrowski reports.
“The company also sees great potential in designing applications or ‘apps’ for its handsets that blend data from several sources,” Dabrowski reports. “For example, instead of a simple calendar with notifications, the company is looking at a calendar which would notify the user of road traffic or weather problems which could affect their ability to make a scheduled meeting.”
MacDailyNews Take: RIM is doomed due to their leaders’ near total lack of both vision and imagination. When it comes to RIM and Apple, two CEOs are not better than one.
Dabrowski continues, “That increased breadth, depth and integration of such software will be a key driver of growth in BlackBerry sales, Lazaridis and Balsillie said.”
MacDailyNews Take: Delusional half-CEOs fighting each other to see who can jam their heads deeper into the sand. In a report from Millennial Media and Mobclix, RIM was estimated to have 3,100 applications vs. Apple’s catalog of 115,000. BlackBerry users download about 0.3 million apps per month vs. Phone users’ 100 million downloads per month.
Full article here.
5 Day Most Commented