Research in Motion (RIM) is the company that makes Blackberry phones. Blackberry mobile phones are going downhill. The phones that sell the most are iPhones and Androids. These are dominating the world market. This is the future of the world market as well. So people are going for these phones and they don’t like Blackberries as much.
RIM is losing jobs and revenue as well. There have been 5,000 layoffs for this company because the company is losing money. Their net sales went down by 42% a year ago to $2.8 billion. The CEO Heins chose to cut costs and downsize but this is not enough for the company. It must find innovative ways to sell their products in the global market. The CEO is not doing the best job as well. He needs to find creative ways to sell the product to gain more of a market share in the phone market.
The Blackberry was first a business phone. Many business people, lawyers, consultants and other people who are in organizations had Blackberrys. This wasn’t enough for the RIM so they had to expand to the regular consumer. They made it more user friendly so the average person could use it, not just corporate people. They gave the phone a music player which most people do not know about.
They should have set up an office inSilicon Valleybecause this would have given them an opportunity to see what other companies are doing. It would have made them compete more with these companies.
In 2010 they set a plan to make a touch-screen rival to iPhone. They came up with the Blackberry Torch which did not do too well. RIM needs to learn to discontinue products and make new ones. Many tech companies have bad products but they are discontinued and the company learns from their mistake. Companies such as Microsoft had Zune and Apple hadNewton. Both of these companies did not do well but they reset and brought out better products. RIM did not make a new innovative product. Their product called playbook did not do too well and they lost a lot of money on unsold playbooks.
There is still hope for RIM to succeed though. They have over $2 billion is cash on hand. The bottom side is that the cash can go away due to costs. Also many of the people who left blackberry for iPhone are not coming back anytime soon. So they have to find innovative ways to get people to subscribe to Blackberry.
He should invest in developing countries as well because there would be a market for the phones. The price is what is most important to know. There is an elite in the developing world that will buy the phone because they need it. The problem will be setting up the infrastructure in the developing world to make it be efficient.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2012/07/how-the-blackberry-died.html