Research In Motion likely to see lacklustre sales in 2012

Research In Motion (RIM) already announced earlier this year that they will have relatively low sales in the last quarter of 2011. However, according to some analysts at Wall Street, the Canadian company will see a huge slump in sales in the second fiscal
quarter, that is January to March.

The US is the largest market for the Blackberry smartphones and the tablet but the company has seen drastically low sales in 2011 and that trend is likely to continue next year. The company has almost 3.1 Million units still in the inventory that are yet
to receive an owner.

Its not only the flagship product, Blackberry Smartphone, but RIM’s tablet, Blackberry Playbook, has also had disappointing response, especially after the release of Amazon’s Kindle Fire. According to analysts, the trend is likely to continue next calendar
year as well.

The main reason is that HTC and Samsung along with Apple are planning to cut corners on the prices of their trending handhelds. Moreover, these same companies are also planning to compete with Kindle Fire on the price front.

Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu said: “We see potential for margin pressure for two reasons: (1) highly competitive pricing from HTC, Amazon, Samsung, and Apple (helped by carrier subsidies) that puts pressure on RIM to match and in many cases beat. (2) Network
outages in early October that will likely put pressure on services and software margins as both carrier and enterprise customers receive concessions and demand discounts.”

The next year, as the analysts put it, will not see new products from RIM. Their major concern is to rid of the excessive inventory and increase sales. Their key product Blackberry Bold 9900 might receive a good response but that’s about it. Otherwise, it
is pointless to bring new QNX phones into the fold.

One analyst painted the future of Blackberry, according to the recent sales records: ” We estimate just 11 million devices sold-through in FQ3, implying a 3.1 million unit channel fill, 50% higher than the normal seasonal channel fill which last year totaled
about1.9M. We do not expect QNX smartphones to ship until mid-2012, creating a lull in demand for the next few quarters.”

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Posted by Usman Khalid on Dec 16 2011. Filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry