You might hear a vast sucking sound, to the North. That would be Research in Motion’s (RIM) rapid slide down the drain.
The Canadian company that turns out bushels of BlackBerrys managed to stink worse than anybody, us included, expected. Revenue dropped by a third in the space of three months, meaning RIM made $1.4 billion less. The losses added up to 24 cents a share, way worse than even the most bearish stock analysts were expecting.
Oh, and it’s firing 5000 employees to save money and delaying its next software update until the beginning of 2013.
That’s if it gets that far. I predicted that RIM wasn’t going to survive 2012 and frankly that just makes it more likely. They’ve had subscriber growth this quarter everywhere but the US, but that lack of subscriber growth in one market was enough to sink their ship. Does anybody really think, with no new software coming for two more quarters, that this trend is going to reverse?
It’s possible RIM will go ahead with its plan to cleave itself in twain, but we don’t see how it’ll help. RIM essentially has to hope it can staunch the bleeding enough to hobble to CES in 2013 and then deliver something that will help it compete with the iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile.
Good luck with that.
(Image via peyri on Flickr)