No good news is emerging for struggling Research In Motion (RIM), makers of once very popular Blackberry range of handsets, which were must have for business people for its innovative secure mobile e-mail capabilities. But nobody even RIM had imagined that one day the same innovative company will face difficulty even retaining its employees. How the advancement of technology can have disastrous effects on a company which do not go by the trend setting technologies, can be best illustrated by the example of RIM and Nokia.
The latest nail in the coffin of RIM has emerged from Australia’s Qantas Airways, which has decided to drop Blackberry phones after its employees voted in favour of Apple’s iPhone in a survey. As reported by news agency- Reuters – Qantas said it was replacing 1,300 company-issued Blackberrys with iPhones and the savings at the end of the program would be about A$1.4 million. IBM was also reported to be dropping RIM for iPhones for 500 employees in Australia.
The problem with RIM is that it is still sticking to its operating software, which no doubt was marvellous few years ago but the time has changed now and today Android or iOS is leading the market. Surprisingly, even those companies which did not have any standing few years ago in mobile market, have come out with flying colurs by adopting Android software in their handsets. As written by us several times in our blogs, RIM and Nokia for reasons best known to them, have not thought about adopting Android in their few handsets and these attitudnal change must have changed the tables for these companies. Probably, they can still revisit this plan of action and can still revive fortunes of their companies.
While on RIM, this company last month posted its first operating loss in eight years and it was much deeper than expected. The company also said it was cutting 5,000 jobs, almost a third of its workforce, as it struggles to survive. Last week RIM said Ray Gillenwater, the head of its Australian and New Zealand operations, had stepped down just months after being promoted to the job, joining a list of senior executives leaving the company.
Lot of consumers still love Blacberry and Nokia devices and they would not like these companies to be history. Hope, the thinking tanks among these companies will come out with revolutinary ideas to take these comapnies out of current storm.
That said, RIM’s situation may be more time-sensitive than the company would hope. From a purely financial perspective, it’s not doing terribly — it has just over $2 billion of cash and equivalents on hand, so it’ll be able to hang in there for at least a little while longer. Meanwhile, confidence in the company is utterly shaken and a look at its stock tells quite the tale nicely. It nearly hit a 52 week low before the earnings statement went out, and it’s since sunk even lower than that. RIM’s stock price hit a low of $7.34 on Friday — that’s over 19% down since the market opened, and the lowest it’s been since 2003. As such, RIM’s market cap has also been shredded, as it’s now sitting at a scant $3.81 billion, compared to over $78 billion just four years ago. With every day that goes by, RIM is left with a growing gap between it and the customers that could save it.