Positive buzz at BlackBerry World
Posted May 4, 2011 04:22:07 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Research in Motion is generating some much needed enthusiasm during its annual conference named after its signature device.
Company co-CEO Mike Lazaridis dazzled the crowd at the three-day conference in Orlando when he did a presentation with a 3-D element. But it wasn’t all sizzle and no steak. Lazaridis also used the address to introduce BlackBerry partnerships with Adobe and Microsoft and to show off a new e-mail client for the PlayBook.
Check out our 5-Part series on Research in Motion: Then and Now…
The mood is in sharp contrast to late last week when the company saw its stock plunge almost 15 per cent amid revised forecasts.
Last Thursday, RIM said that slow sales of its BlackBerry smartphones “particularly in Latin America and the smartphone hotbed of the United States” had forced the company to re-evaluate its outlook for the current quarter, due to end on May 28, and cut its earnings forecast to $1.30-$1.37 per share from $1.47-$1.55.
RIM said it now expects sales of its mobile devices to come in at the low end of its previous forecast of between 13.5 million and 14.5 million units.
That revision, and the subsequent plunge in stock prices, also hits local investors hard, according to Peter Chandler of Canaccord Wealth Management in Waterloo. Chandler says those losses, while “on paper,” are measured in the billions of dollars.
“This is a step back, there’s no question about it,” Chandler asserts. “The future is yet to be written so we don’t know what the net effect is but it certainly is a sobering part of the story of Research in Motion.”
Some estimates suggest the loss to local investors falls in the neighbourhood of $1.5-billion.
