Here’s a sign of just how far BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion has fallen: Apple’s App Store is worth more than the entire Waterloo, Ont. company. Yes — just one Apple property could buy an entire company, lock, stock and smartphone.
Based on the Monday morning share price, RIM is worth around $7.04 billion while the App Store is valued at around $7.08 billion, according to smartphone analyst Brian S. Hall. An analysis by Trefis puts Apple’s market capitalization at $354 with the App Store contributing about 2 percent. The result: $7.08 billion, Hall writes at his blog. For RIM, though, there is little math needed to explain the trouble it faces.
Friday, the roof caved in on RIM after announcing another delay in introducing BlackBerry 10, an OS update that might have pulled the company out of the ditch. Instead, analysts were busy writing the companies obituary, suggesting anything that might appear now would be too little, too late.
Indeed, if anything, these latest financial numbers only highlight how behind RIM really has fallen. As the iPhone and Android fight over which platform will control apps, the Canadian company still hasn’t produced a smartphone consumers will buy. Additionally, RIM’s once-secure enterprise customers are jumping ship to iOS or elsewhere. Perhaps Apple could buy RIM. But the $7 billion question is why bother when the BlackBerry likely will be sold for much, much less in the near future?
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
