RIM CEO Heins says “We cannot compete with larger manufacturers and so must look at how to get more budget smartphones into the market.” I am happy that RIM is finally publicly stating they have a problem. After all the first step to admit you have a problem. For years the company has been saying they are just fine. Well they can no longer continue to go down that rabbit hole. In an exclusive interview with the Telegraph Heins says “We don’t have the economy of scale to compete against the guys who crank out 60 handsets a year. We have to differentiate and have a focused platform. To deliver BB10 we may need to look at licensing it to someone who can do this at a way better cost proposition than I can do it. There’s different options we could do that we’re currently uinvestigating.”
So does that mean that Blackberry might let Samsung or HTC make a phone? I would not go with Samsung as they already dominate the Android market and are looking into to doing the same with Windows Phones. Heins goes on to say that “You could think about us building a reference system, and then basically licensing that reference design, have others build the hardware around it – either it’s a BlackBerry or it’s something else being built on the BlackBerry platform. We’re investigating this and it’s way too early to get into any details. We have to also model this from a finance perspective – that’s why we’re working with the financial advisers to see if we do this where would it take the company. Either we do it ourselves or we do it with a partner. But we will not abandon the subscriber base.”
Just when you think that RIM finally has a guy that makes sense and is getting the company together he states that “If you look at the platform it’s still growing, if you look at the devices we’ve got a single phone that’s sold 45million units.” We must be reading two different stock quotes and sales numbers good sir. Last I looked Research in Motion shares were going for just under $7.50 a each. The same shares use to trade well over $100. Apple now owns the market share where you use to be king. How does Heins explain this? He says that the current difficulties are due to a once-in-a-decade change over to new operating system, BlackBerry 10. um, yeah right buddy.