Are you looking for some good news about on-the-ropes RIM, battered and bruised by Apple’s iPhone and iPad one-two punch? Keep looking. Wall Street’s all but ready to throw in the towel on the punch drunk Blackberry maker.
After last week’s torrent of bad news, this week doesn’t start any better for the Waterloo, Ontario company awash in red ink while caught in a smartphone and tablet riptide. Monday, one Wall Street observer cut RIM shares to $20, rating the stock at “underperform.” This just a day after the same analyst said things couldn’t get any worse.
With a valuation at just .7x (yes, we are down to fractions of a percent) and falling off a cliff since February, RIM shares are “cheap on any metric,” Sanford Berstein analyst Pierre Farragu told investors Monday. On Saturday, Farragu called RIM a “broken brand” as Apple and Android eat the BlackBerry’s lunch, dinner and that snack hiding way in the back of the fridge.
First, Apple chases RIM out of North America, then it shoos the company out of Europe, now RIM isn’t safe in emerging markets, according to the analyst. RIM not only is seeing its enterprise market shrink as more companies adopt iPhone, the consumer sector is also being lost while people junk BlackBerries for other handsets. At the same time, RIM’s sole outstanding feature – email – is being replicated by Apple’s iMessage.
Even after RIM faced the music last week, announcing layoffs and more, when the company thinks things just can’t get any worse – they do.
