“The beleaguered owner of BlackBerry has issued a profit warning after being forced to slash the price of its PlayBook tablet computer to clear stock,” Alex Ralph reports for The Times.
“Research In Motion said in a trading statement, issued yesterday ahead of third-quarter results later in the month, that it had taken a $485 million (£310 million) pre-tax charge to account for the sharply lower value of the tablets, which originally were priced at $500 but now sell for only $200 in the United States,” Ralph reports. “Worldwide, sales of the PlayBook have dropped from about 500,000 in the first quarter to 150,000 in the third. In Britain, retailers including Dixons and Carphone Warehouse have been discounting the tablet by a third.”
Ralph reports, “The PlayBook charge comes as analysts have started to conclude that RIM’s management cannot turn the company around. They are beginning to value it not on its future prospects but on how much it would be worth if acquired, broken up, or simply run down while keeping the BlackBerry service going.”
In an accompanying analysis, Murad Ahmed writes for The Times that Research In Motion’s PlayBook tablet “was a reaction to Apple’s iPad and to a belief that the tablet market would take off. That, in itself, was a mistake. Two years after Apple’s machine was launched, there is no tablet market, just an iPad market.”
MacDailyNews Take: Sounds familiar:
Scratch
tablets. Let’s call it what it really is: The iPad market. – MacDailyNews Take, July 21, 2011
Ahmed writes, “The iPad had set a standard and the PlayBook fell short of it, then expected customers to pay more for an inferior product. It is the kind of mistake that can doom a company.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: You read it here first:
RIM is a dead company walking. – MacDailyNews Take, August 23, 2010
If you got out of RIMM then and there ($47.75 at close), you’d have $30.98 more per share than if you exited yesterday ($16.77 at close).
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Mike Caine” for the heads up.]
Related articles:
Beleaguered RIM misses its revenue forecast; takes $360 million bath to clear unsold PlayBooks; shares plummet – December 2, 2011
Apple ousts beleaguered RIM’s BlackBerry as top business smartphone – November 16, 2011
Beleaguered Sony shares sink on massive loss forecast – November 2, 2011
Beleaguered RIM’s U.S. sales cut in half last quarter as consumers abandoned BlackBerry for Apple iPhone – September 20, 2011
Apple’s iPhone 4 absolutely slaughtered beleaguered RIM’s Blackberry – September 16, 2011
Beleaguered RIM hemorrhaging market share faster than some analysts expected – September 16, 2011
