The net profit of the Canadian company RIM (Research in Motion), a manufacturer of smartphones based on BlackBerry and the PlayBook tablet, in the second quarter of the fiscal year was less than 58.7%, falling from $797 million last year to $329 million. According to RIM’s press release, the company’s revenue decreased by 10% and amounted to $ 4.2 billion.
According to the report, in the second quarter RIM shipped about 10.9 million BlackBerry-based smartphones to stores (one million less than analysts expected) and about 200,000 PlayBook tablets (instead of the expected 490,000).
Jim Balsillie, RIM’s co-manager, called the aging product line the reason for the failures. Despite the fact that the company has recently released seven updated smartphones on the BlackBerry OS 7 platform, they, in fact, have become an addition to the already existing series of devices. The new features of these devices have long been present in devices from Google and Apple.
There is an opinion that buyers decided to wait with the purchase of BlackBerry smartphones until the beginning of next year, when RIM should release communicators on a completely new QNX OS. Now this shell is present only in the PlayBook, writes The New York Times.
The company’s image has been severely damaged by recent problems: since October 10, owners of BlackBerry smartphones have had difficulties connecting to the Internet for three days, as well as accessing the instant messaging and email service. Users in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, Brazil, Chile and Argentina had problems. As compensation, RIM offered to download a collection of “premium” apps for free. The programs will be available in the BlackBerry App World online store for four weeks, starting on October 19.
In total, users will be able to download 12 applications with a total cost of over $ 100, according to a press release. The free set, among other things, will include popular games SIMS 3, Bejeweled, N.O.V.A., Texas Hold’em Poker 2, Bubble Bash 2, Photo Editor Photo Editor Ultimate, translator iSpeech Translator Pro and voice assistant Virtual Assistant. Corporate clients will receive one month of free technical support.
Against the background of the success of Apple’s recently launched iPhone 4S, which is a strong competitor to BlackBerry smartphones in the premium device market, RIM will have to try hard in the near future to stay “afloat”.