“Research In Motion Ltd. said revenue missed its forecast last quarter amid accelerating market-share losses for BlackBerry smartphones and tablets to Apple Inc., sending the shares down as much as 11 percent,” Scott Moritz and Hugo Miller report for Bloomberg. “RIM fell (RIMM) as low as $16.61 in trading before U.S. exchanges opened. The stock had dropped 68 percent this year before today, while Apple advanced 20 percent.”
“Third-quarter revenue was ‘slightly lower’ than the $5.3 billion to $5.6 billion the company had projected and earnings were ‘at the low to mid point’ of its forecast, according to an unscheduled statement from Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM today,” Moritz and Miller report. “RIM said it doesn’t expect to meet its full-year profit target.”
Moritz and Miller report, “The shortfall — the fourth straight quarter sales missed analysts’ estimates — puts more pressure on co-Chief Executive Officers Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis as they seek to revive a company that once dominated the U.S. smartphone market. RIM’s market-share decline has prompted investors such as Jaguar Financial Corp. to call for it to divide into separate companies, seek a merger or sell itself.”
“RIM will record a $485 million pretax provision to revalue the inventory for the PlayBook tablet, which has failed to win over users in a market dominated by Apple’s iPad. RIM said more promotions are needed to drive demand for its tablet, whose shipments slumped to 150,000 units last quarter, the second straight drop. In its most recent quarter, Cupertino, California-based Apple sold a record 11.12 million iPads,” Moritz and Miller report. “RIM said device shipments in the fourth quarter will decline from the third quarter. In the fiscal third quarter ended Nov. 26, BlackBerry smartphone shipments were 14.1 million.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s dinosaur slaughter picks up speed.
Woops! I’ve got blood all over my iPad.
How refreshing to see the the Apple iPad named straight out as the dominating product. No shilly-shallying about the tablet market. Just iPad. Got that right!
I believe that shilly-shallying is an underused but powerful verb.
Kudos, Sir/Madam, on your courageous use of words.
Yes. Fine. And more to the point, cococanuck, your observation is, as they say, spot on.
Or maybe dilly-dallying!
The “Crackberry”, like crack itself, is fun the first few years (decade?) but if you stick with it the only thing people will eventually care about is the circumstances of your death.
Pity but anything can happen…
Moritz finally speaks the truth.
“RIM said more promotions are needed to drive demand for its tablet”
Corporate blindness to actual quality and performance of their devices and services, due mostly to a sense of legacy entitlement, is what defines ‘dinosaur’ in the enterprise, as MDN picks up on. We’re in the post-CRT and the post-analogTV eras, without much screaming, and the post-pulsedialing phone era, and the post-carburetor era, and the post-horse era, ad infinitum….
I, for one, am looking forward to the post-opsono era.
ouch
Meanwhile, Sony just issued a statement that Betamax isn’t dead yet, just that more promotions are needed to drive demand.
AAPL competition just stinks: Rimm 🙂
They got caught off guard? Or foolish to not recognize what was coming: iPhone! in 2007 🙂
AAPL must not let that happen later on!
Buy AAPL now before it passes $401.
2012 = $555 in 12 months from now!!
AAPL’s P/E = 13.1 Amazon’s P/E = 96
Apple’s growing at 40%/year. Will the stock price ever catch up to the company’s reality?
Like this is a surprise to anyone except the trader doofuses who continue to think RIM is still competitive and will have new products to revive its dinosaur business model.
Philip Elmer Dewitt has a good article about how AAPL continues to get no respect from the trader doofuses despite being the second largest company in thee world. And quarter after quarter providing increased sales and profits. And continuing to increase market share and transform personal computing…
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/12/02/about-apples-incredible-shrinking-pe-ratio/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fortuneapple20+%28FORTUNE%3A+Apple+2.0%29
I bet they can’t even give’m away! 🙂
Baffled by the fact that the two clueless co-ceo’s are still in charge to continue doing their damages. Wake up, RIM investors, or you deserve to be losers.
Please RIM, let us know when amateur hour is really over.
You’ll know. It’s called filing for bankruptcy.
A $485M tax loss. Hmmm… let’s assume they knocked off $250 from the wholesale price, that would mean a little under 2M Playbooks revalued at firesale prices.
RIMM’s board better get a new single CEO to replace the Hydra headed monster that has led them down the drain.
Somehow I think they will get someone like “Chainsaw Al” as the next CEO at RIM.
IIRC, Chainsaw Al is behind chainsaw proof bars right now.
Too many cooks spoil the broth. There is only one Cook in Apple.
RIM had a semi truck passing through Vancouver – it was the PlaybookTour truck. It seemed alarming that this kind of promotion, like a rock band on tour would really help their bottom line.
One semi travelling around North America weakly promoting your useless product.
More promotions? I don’t think so.
Please, No! My sister lives in Burnaby, B.C. and described this thing and I refused to believe her. Oh, no.
What was in the back of that semi? Shrink wrapped pallets of unsold Playbooks?
What’s the sound of $485 million being flushed down the toilet? A loud whooshing sound accompanied by a lack of apps on the PlayBook tablet.
It’s not only the PlayBook that’s selling pathetically. The BlackBerry phone has fallen down from previously lofty heights, at least comparatively speaking from 5 years ago when it had the field all to itself. I recently heard from a friend of mine who uses a BlackBerry how he had to bring a 6 month old unit back for servicing 3-4 times for various problems, one of which was when it wouldn’t boot up. A phone that won’t boot up is literally a brick. He gave me an alternate number to call which was his other phone that he carries around with him as a backup in case the BB fails.
So long RIM, it’s been nice knowing you.
Depends on the promo. Buy one POS Playedbook and get a choice of free condoms for life or a box set of Richard Simmons beach body streching in your speedos workout – in 3D! That’s gonna be a big seller! 😉
The big take-away in this story should be the Dellesque advice from Wall Street, “Break it up or sell it.” Really? So the past mans nothing; flush the talent and boil the carcass for soup. Wall Street is the destroyer of innovation.
“Dellesque”! Funny. Michael Dell with his own adjective! It’s as good as “Jobsed”!
Uhm, the pressure is from shareholders. Shareholders have seen the value of their shares diminish precipitously, thanks to the missteps of the Co-CEOs. To the customers, the Past does mean nothing, if the present sucks. If email goes down for days without any info, that sucks. If phones get launched with half-baked software that sucks. If tablets get launched without all the basic apps, that sucks. The Past does mean nothing if the present sucks. Wall Street is not flushing the talent down the toilet, the Co-CEOs ran the company into the toilet.
It’s EASY to point fingers at Wall St., but I’d wager if you asked the employees at RIM who is at fault, they’d point out that the fish rots from the head down.
Time to let RIM be.
I want to see Samsung and Google nailed to the wall…