1
BlackBerry maker RIM's earnings fall 58%
A man looks at his email on a Blackberry.
To view this content, Javascript must be enabled and Adobe Flash Player must be installed.
Steve Chiotakis: Shares of Research in Motion are way down in after-hours trading, after the company that makes the BlackBerry smartphone reported profits fell 58 percent last quarter.
Marketplace's David Gura reports.
David Gura: It used to be BlackBerry was the business smartphone -- but that's started to change. Now, companies are outfitting employees with the Apple iPhone, and smart phones that run on the Android operating system.
Rachel Lashford: People have been enticed by the touch screens and then, of course, the accessibility and usability of the app stores.
That's Rachel Lashford. She's a telecom analyst with Canalys in Singapore. While the market changed, Research In Motion was reluctant to change its product.
Analyst Adam Leach is with Ovum, in London.
Adam Leach: The BlackBerrys that were in the market, the portfolio that RIM was relying on, was getting quite old and really needed a refresh.
RIM has started to do just that. Too late for the second quarter, but Rachel Lashford says new products bode well for the company. Reports of RIM's demise, she says, are premature.
Lashford: It's still a top-five player, and it's still shipping significant volumes worldwide.
In South America, and in countries like South Africa and the U.K.
I'm David Gura, for Marketplace.
If you've ever tried to change some of the more arcane parameters of your Blackberry, you'll quickly realize RIM has a very unique operating system. They have their own messaging service and encryption.
Computer history has shown while this works fine when you have a near monopoly in the early stages of a technology, technology eventually migrates towards open standards.
This will eventually kill RIM as they become an anomaly in the mobile device market.
