Struggling RIM will layoff up to 2,000 employees in an attempt to right itself while it pins its hopes on the Blackberry 10. Wireless industry analyst Peter Misek of Jefferies & Company opines: “We maintain that the only path for RIM is to partner with someone, to be acquired, or to turn themselves into a software company, and I think that path with become very clear to the management team by the end of the year.”
Looks like another Palm in the making?
Hmm.. who would likely buy them out? MS?
Let the acquisition speculations begin!
Maybe Facebook will buy RIM. They seem to want into the handset business for some reason, and they’ll spend a billion dollars on just about anything. Plus they need to convince corporate IT managers that they shouldn’t block Facebook because it’s like the new email or something.
That makes no sense at all. Which is exactly why it will happen.
Opera, RIM & facebook.
What … the … heck?
Edited 2012-05-30 19:19 UTC
Hm…
Facebook has working relationships with mobile operators throughout the world ( http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=391295167130 ), which offer “preferential” access to FB. And the largest part of FB usage growth probably happening via mobile now ( http://www.osnews.com/permalink?519556 )
RIM – clarly also has working relationships with operators, and a subscription-based IM network.
Opera – a mature browser compression technology, and FB is a top site visited by its mobile users already ( http://www.opera.com/smw/2011/11/ )
So – a “free” FB access (fuller one than 0.facebook.com) for subscribers of many mobile carriers, including “Facebook Blackberry messenger”?
Damn, it makes a scary kind of sense…
So they should have stable income i think, just do some marketing to promote it, to remind anyone it’s still here.
QNX was earning in the 50 millions of $ prior to be acquired by Harman International in 2004, at which point its financial report started to be unavailable. And unless the sales have been magically multiplied, it is still likely to be around that amount. Picture me skeptical that QNX sales would save the day for RIM which has income of around 18 billions of $.
QNX is a potential patent goldmine if the wrong kind unscrupulous evil trolls get their filthy paws upon it.
Hope RIM will only sell (if at all) to a serious buyer.
What assets does RIM have to make it so valuable for the potential buyer to pay tens of billions for it? I guess RIM won’t sell for less.
As a software only company RIM doesn’t stand a chance. Sell the software to who? Anybody can get Android for free, WebOS for free, Tizen for free, Bada OS very cheap.
Their only chance is to took it from where Nokia left: make cheap phones, mid level phones, quality phones, durable phones with good battery life. Don’t cater only to a few selected business but to mass market.
Enormous amount of real estate. RIM has been investing into real estate for more than a decade, it is said that they are one of the top three owners of real estate in Canada.
Successful companies do not always just invest into their business or related assets (e.g. manufacturing facilities), often they invest into things that are totally unrelated so they can either be sold, rented to used as guarantees for banks if cash is needed
Fire 2000 employees, who do all the work, or fire ten executives, who don’t do anything anyone can put a finger on… which to do…
…implying that firing ten executives would bring the same savings as 2000 employees, hence the former are paid 200 times more?
Hm, no. Canada might also have this problem, but not quite to the levels of “leading” US: apparently ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_pay#Canada ) the top 100 Canadian CEOs get paid 189x as much as an average Canadian – but of course not all executives at RIM are CEOs (even if RIM had a bit unusual situation with two CEOs
), and typical RIM employee is certainly not society-average.
So we’d have to fire, I don’t know, at least 50 of those at managerial positions? 100? 200?
(and while RIM clearly had some hiccups with its management and decision making processes …I’m not sure if outright gutting them out would help much)