The best news to come from the RIM Q4 2012 conference call was that the company is still on track to ship the new Blackberry models with the Version 10 Operating System in late 2012. The not-so-good news is that things are so dire at RIM that Jim Balsillie has been shown the door as part of an “early retirement.”
The company’s revenue is down about 19% from the same period last year. In addition, RIM was only able to ship 11.1 million Smartphones, which is down 21% from Q3. RIM has announced that it will not be providing specific quantitative guidance.
RIM is planning to hand out as many as 2,000+ prototype BlackBerry units in early May to developers. The company is doing everything possible to seed the development community ahead of the new OS 10 models arriving, so that ample software is available.
As one analyst told us, “…the new BlackBerry 10 models better get here soon, and they had better be competitive with the iPhone and Android models, or it is over for RIM.”
