RIM May Need To Write Off $1 Billion In Inventory 220
benfrog writes "Blackberry maker Research in Motion may need to write off more than $1 billion in inventory, according to Bloomberg. The potential 'writedown' comes after RIM took a $485 million pretax charge to write down the value of its PlayBook inventory in December. RIM has said it aims to save $1 billion in operating costs this fiscal year by cutting its number of manufacturing sites and is 'reviewing its organizational efficiency' across the company, which may lead to job cuts of 2,000-3,000. Its shares have tumbled 75 percent over the past year and are down 90 percent from their all-time high."
RIM may be in freefall (Score:5, Informative)
RIM still made $3.64 billion in revenue last year, for $197.5 million in profit (a huge drop from last year, but they are still making money). RIM definitely could still succeed, but not like this. They are still a massive company with a huge name-brand, they just need to figure out how to use that. It may be unlikely, but I wouldn't mind seeing them succeed: more competition in the smartphone industry could be a very good thing. I'd hate to see it turn into a pure Android/iOS duopoly with no chance of a third competitor (Windows Phone... doesn't really count).
Re:RIM may be in freefall (Score:2, Informative)
Those are the quarterly numbers. In the year ending March 2012 they made $18B in revenue and $1.5B in earnings.
Re:What's With All The RIM Hate? (Score:5, Informative)
Funny, I have a current Bold 9900, and the battery easily lasts a full day with heavy email use and several hours of conference calls. I'm not sure what you're using, but I haven't run into the issues you're talking about since the original Bold like 4 years ago.
Re:HP should buy them (Score:5, Informative)
Almost the entire WebOS team has been hired by Google. I don't think HP is doing anything with WebOS anymore.
Re:Not Surprising (Score:4, Informative)
Here in the UK, BB ownership is very high. However, most users also have another device.
There are two BB communities:
Teenagers, who want BBM for a variety of reasons, and remote wipe for many reasons.
Business users who want integration into corporate infrastructure.
The remaining markets are babies, the elderly and the unemployed, who are not very lucrative.
BB's current problem is that they have saturated the market with long lived devices, and are trying to sell devices to people who dont want them. They need a strategy that trades on that position instead. An old BB works fine, and there is no need to upgrade. Keep supporting the existing customers, and BB will live on, with a solid market base that will sustain them for a long time to come. Trash their customer base by abandoning the existing devices, and they really will die. Maybe they need a paid software upgrade bringing tangible improvements to the really old units?
Re:Why doesn't RIM abandon their terrible OS? (Score:4, Informative)
They actually are abandoning their legacy OS. While it may have been a great smartphone OS when originally introduced, its been pushed far beyond its design limits and is very much running out of steam.
The new OS in development, which is currently called "BlackBerry 10" (formerly called "BBX") is using the same basic modern architecture as everyone else. Under the covers, its using QNX (a POSIX-compliant realtime multitasking OS). On the surface, RIM is building a whole software stack and set of applications. They've got a new UI framework based on C++/Qt called Cascades [blackberry.com]. They're also supporting a variety of additional development options, including raw native code (for game developers), HTML5-based apps, Adobe Air, and even the "Android runtime".
They've also been holding a whole series of developer events [blackberry...ldtour.com] to promote the new platform, and are seeding developer devices to help everyone get started with it. If you actually dig up and see what they've been working on, its obvious that they're dead serious about moving forward to the future.
Of course this all takes time, but they are fully committed to building out the new platform. They've even engaged the whole developer community directly, in more ways than many realize. They've been posting a ton of open source content [github.com], and have made many of their developers and program managers directly accessible to the developers out there in the community.
So people, please stop thinking they're some stodgy company still trying to push 5-year-old phones. They've changed a lot since then. It just takes time for everything to come to market, and even more time for the popular-press (who seems to have negative retorts "in the can" prior to RIM press releases being published) to notice.