Is Blackberry a Dead Company? In 2007 Blackberry, previously known as RIM, harvested it is success in the technology business and was named the most valuable company on Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) surpassing $67 billion in market capitalization (1). The company was a smartphone manufacturer leader and competed against fierce competitors such as Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, and others. Blackberry had a competitive advantage amongst these competitors especially in the business smartphones market. Its competitive advantage was in the secured systems that blackberry offered for business. Blackberry provided high secured platforms for governments especially in North America. Competitors are trying hard to enter this market. (2) Samsung has been trying to promote its dubbed Knox enterprise solution. Samsung provided tremendous resources to promote its dubbed Knox. However, Samsung has struggled to gain traction and has yet to announce any prominent clients for its Knox services. (2) In 2008 Blackberry stock hit $149.90 but its stock crashed with the financial crises and its stock tumbled to low levels of $50 a share. Since then the company struggled to keep its revenues and market cap as high as it used to be coupled with internal problems such as its directors scandals, incompetent products, late releases of new version of smartphones, and thousands of employees’ laid off. The stock price of the company tumbled to lower than $6 a share. The company was sold at a value of $4.7
Making hundreds of millions of dollars, RIM is blowing other competitors out of the water with huge demands for their products. Skipping almost a decade to 2007, when RIM’s subscriber base jumps to 8 million and revenues double to over $3 billion. That same year, RIM becomes Canada’s most valuable company, surpassing Royal Bank of Canada’s market worth on the TSX. BlackBerry’s innovation is what started the company and continues to improve it. Canadian inventions like the first telephone, Java programming language and the famous Canadarm required great innovation, like BlackBerry, to make them prominent and to stand out from the rest of the world. In conclusion, BlackBerry’s bold features and breakthroughs in telecommunications have shaped our mobile experiences we have
According to the article “BlackBerry Posts Loss as Phones Go Unsold”, BlackBerry performs a poor performance. Business has a quarterly loss in 2013 for $965 million. The revenue had drop 45% that down to $1.57 billion from $2.86 billion compares with a year earlier. BlackBerry lost $248 million, or 47 cents a share, and analysts forecast 49 cents a share loss for the quarter ended August 31. The net loss is $235 million which excluding inventory charge and restructuring charges in the latest quarter. The cash position also down to $2.6 billion from $3.1 billion at quarter-end. Smartphone maker report a hefty operating loss of nearly $1 billion charge on inventory of unsold phones.
By the summer of 2012, the company that created the legendary BlackBerry, the “crackberry”, the use of which caused loyal users to become addicted now seemed to be on a collision course with oblivion. All signs pointed to Research in Motion, RIM, the company who at the beginning of the new century invented a handheld device that spread like wildfire, either being eviscerated for its parts or sold at fire sale prices.
A Good Man is Hard to Find “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Conner is a story about a family vacation ending tragically. The Grandmother convinces Bailey (her son) that they should go to Tennessee instead of Florida for vacation because the kids have been to Florida before. She tells him that “the Misfit” just escaped from prison and is heading to Florida. Bailey gave in and takes them to Tennessee. The Grandmother is eager to see a house that was on an old plantation that was once there when she was younger.
In 2011, Apple increased their market share from 15.6% to 19% while RIM fell from 16% to 10.4% (Global Mobile Statistics, 2012). There are several different prospering smart phone brands that are negatively impacting RIM’s financial success. Not only are there a large number of competitors, but they are also well known companies such as Sony, Samsung, Google, and Apple to name a few. These are dominant companies in the electronics sector and all of which have large fixed costs so they must operate at economies of scale and produce near capacity. In turn, they have to sell all these products so that competition becomes more aggressive (Clegg pg.62). These companies all have the competitive advantage of offering their consumers another product lines whereas BlackBerry only offers phones and the new PlayBook which hasn’t been overly successful.
The great Ancient Egypt civilization is filled with magnificent architecture that made its culture rich. The Stepped Pyramid by Imhotep, Mortuary precinct of Djoser 2630-2611 BC, and the Great Pyramids of Gizeh 2490-2228 BC, are an important part of the Ancient Egypt culture. Also the Ka and Maet played a vital role in making these monuments. Ancient Egyptians really cared about their Pharaohs and Gods and did anything to keep them satisfied, even if it meant to carry a 2.5 ton block up 450 feet. The Pyramids of Gizeh and the Stepped Pyramid have some similarities, many differences, and have a major influence in keeping the Ka of the pharaoh happy .
With worldwide demand for wireless handheld’s, RIM quickly identified the market potentials which saw them launching BlackBerry products with outstanding functions. Eventually, this lead to their explosive growth with revenue skyrocketing to $6 billion. However, a corporate giant cannot reach such heights without deploying thriving
RIM has had a rash of bad press due to failures in its email system as well as its product and management strategy. RIM has suffered two major disruptions of service in 2009 and 2011 that have tarnished the touted reliability standard that has been a standard marketing tool for BlackBerry devices. In 2011 alone, RIM stock dropped more than 50% due to a series of product errors and profit warnings. (Sharp & Prodhan, 2011)
RIM has a wide range of customers and established in many developed countries which can gain its brand image among its competitors. As RIM is responsible for innovation of high technology products, there is an effective R&D in RIM to make RIM stay competitive in smartphones industry. A strong relationship between RIM and its service providers showed one of RIM’s core capabilities.
Celebrities and the general population worldwide were captivated with BlackBerry and were switching away from competitors like Palm, HP, and Dell. In 2006, RIM had become Canada’s most valuable company; its shares were close to $124.51 per share. The company was worth over 67.35 billion dollars and the subscribers had climbed to 5 million.
There are many competing brands of smart phones and Samsung has reported a decline of profits in 2014. Information from GSM arena shows than Samsung released 54 new phone models in 2014 , compared with 24 by HTC , 11 Motorola and 2 by Apple, leading to increased production costs and lack focus on a specific customer segments thereby losing some of its competitive advantage (GSM Arena , 2015).The lack of popularity of its own OS (Tizen ) and dependence on Google’s Android platform makes it vulnerable on google to develop an “ecosystem”. There are component integration issues as well as loss revenue from potential App sales (Strategic Mangement insight , 2015). Negative publicity from litigation due to patents are likely to continue as technology patents are vague and Samsung with is large portfolio is likely to infringe on some of the patents (Tibken, 2014).
Smartphone market is fast-moving and very high competitive due to intense competition between two big smartphone producers, Apple and Samsung. At the beginning, Apple dominated this market solely by introducing a new innovative type of smartphone by Steve Jobs that has revolutionized people lifestyle and mobile industry. A few years after launching iPhone, a new fast following competitor, Samsung came into this market, and their sales have outperformed Apple from the year 2011 (According to Chart A1 in Appendix). In term of developing their product, Samsung has created its products by following Apple’s technology since the beginning of producing its smartphone, therefore there are many patent lawsuits between them. Since Steve Job passed away, Apple has continued to develop its core competence, which is an innovation of new type of smartphone that could help them to take back their market share from its rival, Samsung. Nonetheless, the competition between Apple and Samsung will still continue intensively in the future.
Research in Motion (RIM) was founded in 1984 and launched the BlackBerry smartphone in 1999, which made it one of the leaders in cell-phone innovation (RIM). In fact, for almost a decade, the BlackBerry was the product to have for people who were interested in cutting-edge sell phone technology. However, when Apple released the iPhone, it made a dramatic impact on BlackBerry's market. The recent release of a significant number of smartphone competitors has further impacted RIM's business. Despite these losses, RIM seemed to remain a viable competitor in the cell-phone industry, even if it had lost much of its market share. Some recent events have occurred that make RIM seem as if it may not be able to retain its current market share and may be in an unstoppable decline.
To continue to compete in the mass consumer market, RIM will need to design a specific product line that targets the masses and price competitively to make an impact in market share. This new line of Blackberry smart phone products must be price sensitive allowing a sales advantage. Revamping the Blackberry App Store will play a critical role in attracting new customers. Providing customers with a larger variety of applications is necessary to attract a larger younger non-corporate demographic group. Developing more applications will be a challenge, however creating greater financial initiatives for third-party application developers will help overcome this. To help further boost app development, RIM will establish partnerships with carriers to develop and sell apps, allowing carriers a mutual benefit from app revenue. Apple has removed the carrier revenue app benefits. RIM will re-introduce that opportunity to the carrier to strengthen relationships, along with carrier branded phones. The marketing of the new product line will be critical toward its success. Thus, improved carrier partnerships will
In 2010 ComScore Inc. did a study emphasizing that RIM points out 51.2% of the business smartphones market, while iPhone accounts for 22.7%. Thus, “BlackBerry is mainly for business use and for corporate customers, it is hard to just compared total company sales and not look at sales in specific market segments” (BBinsight, 2010). The figure below also illustrates that 12.10% of business users buy Google smartphones and 8.80% -