RIM's unsold inventory of BlackBerrys, PlayBooks swells to $1B value - Page 2

Quote:

Originally Posted by Quadra 610 

Apple had Gil Amelio. Problem. 

 

Apple had Gil Amelio who thought it would be a great idea to acquire NeXT and bring back Jobs (of course, only after negotiations to acquire Be Inc. failed.) And Jobs wanted it. Much, much less of a problem. Apple always had that Steve Jobs connection.

 

Interesting that even when Apple had that turkey Amelio, there was *still* enough prescience within the company to recognize greatness and put it to work.

 

Who does RIM have?

There's a ship laying on its side in the Mediterranean, and the world's luckiest captain, who managed to fall into a lifeboat, is out of work. HE can guide this sinking wreck to shallow water near shore... Francesco Schettino is RIM's man who's time has come!!!!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Macky the Macky 

 

Maybe RIM's management thinks that by dribbling out the bad news it won't "Wake Up" the stock holders.

And I think that strategy may very well work.  Anybody that hasn't already woken up to the fact that RIM is toast can sleep through an earthquake.

Thompson

Quote:

Originally Posted by SpamSandwich 

 

Dumped them in the ocean? That would be an illegal environmental hazard. Where did you get this from?

If you dump crap in the ocean and call it a fish sanctuary it ceases to be an environmental hazard. Didn't you know that??

Quote:

Originally Posted by Apfeltosh 
Only a complete moron would cheer that all of Apple's competitors go bankrupt. 

Competitor? Microsoft has done a better job competing than these clowns.

Nope.

All the legal monopolies seem to be doing all right with prices.

Except that's out in October.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Constable Odo 
I feel bad for the average workers who are going to suffer due to gross mismanagement by a couple of CEO's.  I guess two heads aren't always better than one.  I

Yeah as dumb as this situation is, it still very sad.  I hope Blackberry can make something happen after the layoffs.  IBM laid off 60,000 workers in July of 1993 and it was widely believed they were a goner.  They pulled it out and are a healthy company today.

Quote:

Originally Posted by melgross 
I don't see anythi g they can do other than to sell themselves.

Looks like that's exactly what's bound to happen after this fiasco:

http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/150353/rim-chief-forecasts-grim-q1-performance-after-shares-halted

And their ex CEO did not even end up with a second rate hockey team after spending all the good time, effort and money.  Dumb.

RIM your in denial, remember what happen to the storm? What goes around comes around.

As Winston Churchill once said. Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning of RIM's slow but sure demise. " 

When will RIM sell all their phones at discount prices just like HP sold their tablets?

Iit's called creative destruction ... look it up on wikipedia.  In a fast moving space like smart phones, you have a series of winners, each with market power for a limited time, each that get plowed under by the next new thing.  The key thing is that the business model that works for each stage is usually different so that the companies that command one era seldom command the next era.  

Look at how different each of these are:

Palm/Handspring =>  RIMM => Apple (or Samsung/Google)

This is happening to WinTel now.  They were the behemoths of the 90's and 00's even but the client market is moving to wireless thin devices and the heavy lifting is moving to servers.  The heavy desktop apps like spreadsheets and graphics will be where people will still need full PCs.  An explosion of diversity compared to what has been.

I'm over at http://investordiscussionboard.com if you want to discuss financials.

TabletCoder

A billion dollars worth of RIM stock?

I'd buy that for a dollar!!!

I will not make light of someone else's misfortune, even though I started the very first Mac user group way back when and then continued to buy apple products through all the good and bad years.  I heard all the verbal abuse all along the way.

The fault for this failure to perform and lack of leadership at RIM belongs to RIM's senior management, not the rank and file employees who will get hurt the most.   Every senior exec in the world should be asking themselves one question weekly -- what have I done to create a new product/solution so wonderful that it will cannibalize and eventually replace my existing products?   Boards of directors should be held accountable if they and senior management can not answer that question.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hyram Gestan 

I will never forgive RIM because they ridiculed the iPhone when it first came out.  I hope that they die.

Did you design the iPhone? No, so why do you care? You are a truly sad fanboi. Sad.

Trolls trolling trolls… 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Apfeltosh 

Did you design the iPhone? No, so why do you care? You are a truly sad fanboi. Sad.

I don't forgive the RIM co-ceo's for their complete and utter stupidity and for their board to keep them in place as long as they did, and for both Wall Street and Washington DC for financially supporting them when it was clear they were just hanging onto their already old technology.

And today, there are still companies, governments and financial institutions who just can't say no to using a BB, even in the face of better alternatives.  It's like what I hear from people who are dyed in the wool Chevrolet fans.  They bought the crap of a Cavalier for years, not because it was the best car out there, but because it was a Chevy.

Quote:

Originally Posted by haar 

RIM should donate all of the used playbooks, to the university of waterloo, laurier, toronto... heck all of the canadian universities... maybe then they may be useful. (or become useful)... because the canadian taxpayers are ultimately going to pay for this inventory, thus the effectively lower taxes caused by the inventory write-down.. IMO.

Actually, anyone getting free RIM stuff probably would have higher costs dealing with these obsolete products. Not to mention, the morale hit... "Geez, we're so impoverished they won't even give us free Android stuff. Wow, we really suck more than we thought we did."

Quote:

Originally Posted by aaarrrgggh 

For a market cap of less than $6B... a $1B write-down is pretty huge. Given their PE is around 5 (call it a forward PE of 10)... it would seem like it is time for a turn-around specialist to come in.
What could they do to become relevant again?

There's no turnaround, as I mentioned in another thread, it's all "containment" now like in those post-apocalyptic movies. Go room-by-room purging everything with flame then retreat to a safe distance as the nuke is dropped.

Quote:

Originally Posted by melgross 


Give me a break! So they say sales in Nigeria and Indonesia are doing well. Wow! That's certainly a measure of success. Let's see, smartphone penetration of all cellphone users in Nigeria is 5%, and RIM has half of that. So how many phones a year are sold in Nigeria? There are over 150 million people there. But a third, almost, are children. How many of the 100 million can actually afford to buy a phone, remembering that phones there aren't subsidized? What do we get, maybe 5 million phones sold a year? 10 million (doubtfully)?
5% of 10 million is 500,000. RIM is said by some to have half of that. So they sold 250,000 phones there last year. Well, that's not much.
They are in the red, as they lost money last quarter, and are expected to continue losing money for the foreseeable future. They make almost all their profits in developed countries, and most of that in N America.
RIM is running out of time.

RIM has some momentum in developing countries because it's the most affordable smartphone outside of iPhone (which is premium) and Samsung (which is now relatively premium and which has surpassed Blackberry). 

The concern is that if sales are doing well in developing countries... Why do they have so much inventory? Something is up. When an infection spreads through the company, there's nothing left to do but take it out the back and shoot it. 

I feel sorry for them on one level, but in my 10 years of work experience, I've seen companies and people of all trades do this to themselves. Karma is a ruthless but just bitch.

Quote:

Originally Posted by melgross 

Unfortunately, you know it doesn't work that way. While "C" level executives do get fired, if a company is screwed because of their decisions, or that of others, the company is still screwed. The company will falter and maybe fail. If that happens, people get fired. There's no other way.

It's the old way of business, and indeed, they reap what they sow. Boards and C-Level can prance from failure to failure, that's their karma to face.

But for companies, it's pretty obvious nowadays how to succeed. That is, use common sense, listen to what customers want, and don't be arrogant pricks.

Any company that doesn't do that, is simply doomed this century. They can be propped up for years or decades, but eventually, the walls will cave in.

I'm a strong believer in small business enterprise, though you can get the other extreme - a mom and pop show where they also have no idea what they are doing.

In the end, it's all about people. The right people can make anything happen, regardless of their "training", "education" or "skills" starting point.

Steve Jobs was a great visionary, but he was able to corral a team of people the world has never seen since perhaps the Renaissance.