The company behind BlackBerry has seen its profits almost halved as sales of its tablets and smartphones fell below expectations.
Research In Motion (RIM), which has has more than 70 million subscribers, painted a grey picture for its second quarter.
The company’s net profit fell 47% to $419m, while revenue was down 10% to $4.2bn, compared to $4.6bn in the same quarter of last year.
RIM’s Nasdaq-listed shares fell as much as 19% to $24.20 in after-hours trade following the results.
During the quarter, RIM sold approximately 10.6 million BlackBerry smartphones and approximately 200,000 BlackBerry PlayBook tablets.
Analysts had expected much higher figures of around 12 million and 600,000 respectively.
The poor results show how far BlackBerry has fallen behind Apple’s iPhone and devices – Apple sold over 20 million iPhones and more than nine million iPads in the same period.
In July, Research In Motion announced it was cutting 10% of its workforce because it was struggling to keep up with competitors.
However, RIM’s co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie defended the company’s performance, saying results would improve in the second half of the year.
Mr Lazardis said: “We understand that the past few quarters have been challenging and we are confident that we are on track to return to growth in Q3 and beyond.”
Mr. Balsillie added: “We successfully launched a range of BlackBerry 7 smartphones and we are seeing strong sell-through and customer interest for these new products.”
RIM is working to get the QNX software that powers its PlayBook tablet onto its next generation of smartphones, possibly as soon as early 2012.
No comments:
Post a Comment