Research in Motion, the Canadian company behind the BlackBerry smartphone, has just posted its quarterly financial report. Things aren’t looking good for the company, who posted losses of £78m ($125m) within the past three months.
RIM’s Q1 financial report for 2011 showed profits of $934m, a stark difference from today’s reports. Overall revenue has fallen by a staggering billion dollars, from $5.2bn to $4.2bn, as the company struggles to keep up with the likes of Apple, Nokia and Samsung. Revenue fell 19% from the previous quarter, which spanned from October – December 2011.
In January of this year RIM’s Co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis both stepped down to make way for Thorstein Heins, who took the reins at the company. Balsillie joined the company’s Board of Directors at the time, but has now stepped down from his position to leave, after being with the company since its inception over 20 years ago.
Several other long-standing members of the company have now left, including Chief Technology Officer David Yacht and Jim Rowan, COO of Global Operations.
RIM’s financial report shows that less BlackBerry smartphones have shipped in the first quarter of 2012 when compared to the final quarter of 2011, with a 21% drop down to 11.1 million units shipped. After being on sale for almost a year (19th April marks the 1 year anniversary), the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet has reached the 500,000 mark in sales – compare that to the 3 million ‘new iPads’ that Apple sold in just the first weekend of sales earlier this month.
Shortly after the financial report was announced, shares in the company fell by around 9%. Stock prices have been falling gradually over the past year, and the recent 9% fall puts the overall drop in price at around 80% in the past year.
The company’s new CEO Thorstein Heins was keen to confirm where the company was headed, showing that RIM had plans to focus more on its grass roots – the business user.
“We plan to refocus on the enterprise business and capitalise on our leading position in this segment,” he said.
“We believe that BlackBerry cannot succeed if we tried to be everybody’s darling and all things to all people. Therefore, we plan to build on our strength.”
Business email is one of the BlackBerry brand’s key features and one that many businesses still rely on due to its high level of security. However, the company also stated it will focus on other strong points in the consumer market, such as its BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) instant messaging software, and affordable smartphones for the pay as you go market.
The company was also keen to confirm that the next generation of BlackBerry smartphones it is working on – ones using the BlackBerry 10 operating system – are still under development and will be launched in the second half of this year.
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