“RIM may see a bounce back in the market simply out of carrier worries of an Apple and Google duopoly, Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu learned on Friday,” Electronista reports.
“After talking to carriers, he heard that networks are worried about the ‘growing dominance’ of Android and the iPhone and were sorely looking for a third option to keep competition up,” Electronista reports. “With Nokia not due to ship its first Windows Phones until September, he said, the BlackBerry could benefit simply by being a well-established company with a recently revamped phone line.”
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Electronista reports, “With the view that RIM had hit its floor, Wu broke from expectations and became one of the few analysts to recommend buying RIM stock. There was still a risk it would lose to Apple and Google, or that it would have to push prices down and skew more towards lower-end phones. The researcher saw that concern as already baked into the stock value and raised his target value to $35, up from the $28 it was at today.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: It doesn’t matter what the carriers want. It matters what the customers want.
What a bunch of malarky. RIM is washed up. Carriers have plenty of phones to sell, they don’t need RIM.
Sounds like they have a lot of faith in a dead company walking!
What’s the point of encouraging competition if the competitors can only come up with second- and third-rate imitations of the best products? The popular belief that competition fosters innovation is obviously false.
This conclusion (duopoly) is totally misguided. It is derived from the carrier’s love-hate relationship with Apple; love (for the massive high-end subscriber numbers and profits), hate for degrading their offerings to the (rightful) status of a dumb pipe.
Android is not a single product, made by a single company. It is a patchwork of versions deployed on a myriad of hardware devices large and small, made by various companies from different corners of the globe. Google exercises zero control over its deployment and implementation, while carriers in fact butcher it to their liking, in order to sustain the old model of selling add-on services and features (and crippling standard ones along the way). Carriers have nothing to fear from Android; they love it. In fact, Android is their saviour in that it gives them precisely what Apple has been able to take away (ability to control hardware and software). With Android hardware makers competing against each other for carriers’ affection and deals, there is no need to prop up the limping RIM.
Shaw Wu used to be reasonably accurate with regards to hes analysis of Apple (and AAPL), but of late, he is off more often than not.
Actually all companies are more concerned with the bottom line but there is also a fine line between need and want .
If worldwide carriers did not carry the iPhone , it’ sales would be dismal .
If apple had not reached an agreement with carries that are beneficial for both, the iPhone would have gone bust
Luckily carriers Realise how much more they can gain from using the iPhone especially for data charges.
@ MDN Take. Perfect… If customers were not buying RIM products before, they are not going to start buying them now to make the carriers happy.
RIM is a nice Short Sell. I think I’m going to tinker with a few short sell contracts with RIM. Their situation can only get worse with the eminent release of cloud and iOS 5
Wasn’t BlackBerry THE smart/enterprise phone before iPhone came along. It was pretty much the dominant device. Did the carriers worry then about preventing market dominance?
You can crap in one hand and wish in the other and see which one gets filled firs.
While Apple continues to invent the future, carrier leadership is distinguished by its uniformly bureaucratic, uncreative, grasping, greedy, unworthy, lack of vision. All they bring to the game are dumb pipes, yet fantasize themselves as players, or masters of the universe.
Who gives a shit about what worries them.
WiMax or other wide area mobile could eventually destroy the value of any existing “carrier” who doesn’t innovate and trash its existing systems.
Apple could indeed start to produce a wi-fi repeater in new form factor and have a system that would work mostly “off the cell networks” in population areas where most people live. Even in sparsely populated areas a directional antenna can bridge gaps in population of 10 miles.
Don’t count innovation or Apple out.
I don’t see RIM thinking big.
Interesting! These are the same ones who are trying to make a duopoly by merging and pushing Sprint out of business in the Telecom market.
The carriers are not looking for Phone OS “competition” in the true sense of the word. They seemed fine when Symbian was all over the place. But in those days the carriers called all of the shots and controlled all of the wireless revenue streams.
What the carriers are concerned about is Android turning into the second coming of iOS with Google demanding more concessions and the carriers being cut out of even more lucrative revenue streams on both the iOS and Android platforms.
Too bad, carriers. Apple busted up your grip on the wireless market back in 2007, and consumers are not going to let you revert to the old business practices. In fact, we despise the fact that we are still being charged outlandish fees for texting and similar functions, and those have to go, too.
Compare the auto industry in the 20th Century to the cell phone industry in the 21st Century.
Hundreds of Auto suppliers collapsed to many dozens within a couple decades and down to 3 by 5 decades later.
Phone makers ruled on style, color and “little features” for the first 2 decades with dozens of phone makers.
By 2020, how many “players” will still be pawing the felt of the gaming table? I think it is likely to be only 2-3 OSs and probably only 2-3 “majors”.
Majors will invest HEAVILY & CONTINUOUSLY to stay current and push tech. forward, and those that don’t (RIM) will simply fade away.
Here’s the underlying plot point:
Apple is about to release a world phone that REALLY puts the customer in charge of who they will choose as a service provider. The phone companies don’t want to have to compete for these customers on price because that means a race to the bottom of the profit barrel.
Hence, they want to remain in control and they fear being sidelined in this process
Support Apple not carriers. Specially those butt kissing companies to carriers.
Horse breeders worry about buggy whip competion.
one of the great strengths of iOS is that it does not need to totally depend on carriers. It’s got the iPod Touch and the iPad.
Carriers if they had their way would try to limit the iPhone as it’s too disruptive to their businesses (e.g crapware loading). That’s why many carriers around the world try to push Android, rim etc with all kinds of promotions and advertising.
athough android outsells iPhone (due to massive carrier promotions and more carriers) with ipad etc iOS activations at 222 million outshine android at 135 million. If iOS was totally dependent on carriers Apple would have more problems.
(likewise for years the media producers have tried to limit Apple’s iTunes power by selling songs to Amazon cheaper than to apple. That’s why I believe Netflix etc have access to wider range of movies than Apple. Everyone is worried about Apple’s dominance.)
Ummm, in what alternate universe have the U.S. carriers EVER been interested in selling Nokia??