Adding to their already existing troubles, RIM has announced a delay in the release of their new line of BlackBerry phones. They will now be released only by next year. It was expected that this new line of phones will help the company revive their position in the market, but this delay is sure to impact them adversely.
RIM, with their outdated Blackberry 7 OS, has been struggling to keep up in the highly competitive mobile market ever since they lost their dominance over the smartphone market to Apple and Google. In such a situation, the BlackBerry 10 range of phones could have provided the company a much needed boost. This delay comes as a surprise as RIM’s CEO, Thorsten Heins, has always maintained at recent events that the development of the new line of phones based on the BB10 OS was running on schedule and that the phones would be on sale in the upcoming holiday shopping season.. The previous delay in the release of the BlackBerry 10 range coupled with other issues caused co-chief executives in the management team to quit the company
The recent announcement of the new delay comes with the company facing losses of $518 million, resulting in investors and analysts doubting the company’s future. Besides, RIM has also announced 5,000 job cuts, raising further doubts on the dropping morale of the employees that may have caused the delay in the release. Heins blames the overwhelming amount of software coding that the company has to handle for the delay, and not technological problems. He was confident that BlackBerry 10 phones will still manage to efficiently compete with other platforms upon its release.
This delay could severely impact RIM, as BlackBerry 10 phones will be launched after the next version of iPhones arrive in the market and other phones running on Windows 8 and Android are launched, making it difficult for RIM to gather support of users, pointed out analysts. RIM’s revenue had already fallen by 43 percent, from $4.9 billion to $2.8 billion in the first quarter of last year. RIM’s investors had been warned this May of the company facing losses this quarter.
Having considered other options like selling their hardware division or licensing the BB 10 software to save their slipping position, RIM does realize that the best way out is to cut down on costs and sell their upcoming BB 10 phones successfully, but whether they’ll be able to deliver is another matter altogether; and getting less likelier by the day.
