16th December 2011

RIM share price continues it’s slide

Research In Motion (RIM)’s woes continue apace after the issuing yesterday of their Q3 figures. Whilst the business still posted a heatlhy profit for the quarter, it was force to write down $485 of “exceptional items” which mostly related to unsold Playbook tablets. $485 million is a lot of unsold hardware and I guess the annoucement is saying that RIM doesn’t expect it to ever be sold.

RIM haven’t had a good year. They have had to delay their new OS launch – Blackberry ONX – until the end of 2012 (probably at the same time that the iPhone 5 will be shipping). They were also hit by the very well documented 3 day outage that impacted both enterprise and consumer customers. Finally, this year’s Christmas trading figures show a slump in sales with Android and iPhone taking up the slack.

RIM’s share price fell 7% yesterday alone, and is now down 70% from it’s peak value. The world appears to have turned against RIM and it could be a tough 2012 for them.

Barry Hesk