The quarterly profit of Research In Motion (RIM) has fallen and profits have missed its own forecast, causing the maker of BlackBerry to cut its outlook and send its shares down by 15 percent on Thursday.
Rim has been facing intense competition in the corporate smartphone market by Apple and Google and has consequently warned that the latest models of the company are not set to be launched in the U.S. until the back-to-school shopping season. The extension in the launch will probably add to the disappointment that is felt by the investors in the aftermath of RIM’s weak launch of its PlayBook tablet computer, which was held this spring.
According to analyst Colin Gillis of BGC Partners, the company is going through a transition he described as an abyss, adding that even if RIM were to come out with a new model, it will still be running on the old platform. BGC is one of the many critics of the company’s development pipeline.
Although the company has promised its consumers that smartphones that are to be launched in the coming year will run on the new QNX platform, it will only be done after the company releases more devices with an updated version of the current operating system. QNX has been featured in the PlayBook. On Thursday, the company stated that the new Torch and Storm models are not to go up for sale until late August.
The delay in sales has caused RIM to predict shipments between 11 million and 12.5 million smartphone units in the present quarter, which is significantly lower than the prediction analysts made of more than 14 million.
RIM missed its own estimate and RIM shipped 13.2 BlackBerry units up to May 28 in three months.
After the April launch, RIM also shipped 500,000 units of the Playbook tablet in the six weeks, which exceeded the forecast of 366,000 by the average analyst. However, the number of sales only represents a very small portion of the sales that Apple made from its launch of the iPad.
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