It’s been a bad year for RIM so far. Their BlackBerry business has been harried on all sides by the iPhone, and their stock has delated largely thanks to the arterial spray of customers they are losing to Apple.
Worse, in response to the iPad, RIM released the much heralded BlackBerry Playbook, which might just go down in the books as one of the worst, least functional and woefully misguided pieces of consumer technology ever.
Finally, just last week, Apple totally eliminated RIM’s sole advantage over iOS by announcing iMessage, which Wall Street is already saying will kill BlackBerry’s remaining prospects in enterprise.
Anyone surprised that RIM”s now announcing layoffs after seeing their first quarter results? I thought not.
According to the Research In Motion’s quarterly results, net income for the quarter was just $695 million, or $1.33 per share diluted, compared with net income of $934 million in the prior quarter and net income of $769 million in the same quarter last year.
Needless to say, RIM is trying to chalk this up to some unexpected delays in exciting new product introductions, as opposed to being vaporized by Apple. They claim they’ll see “strong profit growth in the latter part of fiscal 2012.”
That’s a year away, though, so in the meantime, RIM is reducing headcount in what they are calling a “realignment” that will be “focused on taking out redundancies and a reallocation of resources to allow us to focus on the areas that offer the highest growth opportunities and align with RIM strategic objectives, such as accelerating new product introductions.”
I smell a debacle. Anyone else?
