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.
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.
35 responses to “Wall Street Puts RIM On Deathwatch After Last Round of iOS Beatings”
RIM RIP
iMessage is not for sending email, Ed.
RIM should have stuck to doing on thing – producing handsets and software for enterprise. Instead they got gready and tried to appeal to everybody. So millions of teenage girls started buying their phones to take advantage of BBM and RIM got rich, lost sight of what they were doing well in the beginning and rested on their laurels, reproducing the same tired handset time and time again, giving it a new colour or an extra curve here and a new model number there and as such the teenage girls kept buying.
The oneday Apple announced iMessage and the teenage girls realised they could get the same feature elsewhere in a much more fashionable and ‘user-orriented, user-friendly’ device and that has left RIM with nought.
RIM should not have got gready and now they’re heading the same way as most fad’s… into the history books of “something nobody should have done”.
Good bye Blackberry!
At tAt the same time, RIM’s sole outstanding feature – email – is being replicated by Apple’s iMessage. It’s not email, it’s called BBM.
It’s
RIM’s sole outstanding feature was BB Chat; not email.
Yeah, it was BBM (Blackberry Messenger) – which the iMessage replicated. Apart from that, the only good thing a BB has is its awesome screen, especially that of 8900s’.
Neither is BBM! #duh I bet your not a RIMM investor. At this point, making excuses for them or trying to point out other companies (supposed) flaws, just makes you look completely & totally CLUELESS!! Have a nice day & remember to dump your RIMM stock as quick as possible! There’s no recovery happening in their future!
1) It does not require a domain name or anything. You don’t need to create a Blackberry ID. You just get one.
2) Its more like a instant message – sms – email combo.
3) BBM is 24/7 active, unlike email.
No, not just BBM, their Email is magnificent, the only one in the market which offers read receipt. I’m using iPhone anyway… :)
No, not just BBM, their Email is magnificent, the only one in the market which offers read receipt. I’m using iPhone anyway… :)
I think RIM needs to stop trying too hard become a celebrity in gadget industry, I mean common… They made press conference for like, 3 times a week?! In every country! Geez… That’s heck of PR…
They need to focus on delivering promises and adding additional surprise (a smart one, not 2.7″ touch screen Onyx, ridiculous huh…) rather than bad mouthing other company and keep saying “it’s an ICONIC product” while they barely able to design a proper icons for their own ‘iconic’ product!
How stupid that many ppl don’t know what is BBM and iMessage… It’s just like Whatsapp anyway… Did you all use smartphone???
If this means my rude boss can no longer text to his daughter on his BB while in a one on one meeting with me, I’m all for it.
Competition is good for consumers. It’s bad for all of us, even Apple users, if RIM can’t compete.
I don’t see RIM losing enterprise business as much as expected because their phones are IT friendly, durable, and inexpensive compared to the iPhone. Of those reasons, it seems that the IT friendly (meaning IT can control EVERYTHING) is the most important. Of the companies I’ve worked for, if IT won’t support it, you don’t get it.
WHERE ARE THE STATISTICS TO SUPPORT ALL YOUR CLAIMS MR. SUTHERLAND.
THIS IS APPALLING JOURNALISM. YOU OWE IT TO YOUR READERS TO AT LEAST PROVIDE STATISTICS TO BACK UP ALL THIS GARBAGE OPINIONATED BULL-CRAP YOU’VE PUT OUT!
IF I WANTED GOSSIP, I WOULD HAVE GONE TO ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT!
I think you should come here and post that message here in 6 months time. You’re a whole year too early on that thought.