The Canadian manufacturer behind the BlackBerry smartphones, Research in Motion, which is currently struggling to revive its declining sales competing with the products of Apple and the Android based smartphones and tablets in the market, has been played up by Leon Cooperman, a hedge fund manager, who has stated that the new upcoming platform of the BlackBerry maker will help it in rebounding in the market, especially the US. Cooperman, whose hedge fund has recently purchased a stake in the Canadian phone maker, said that people believe the company to be an ice cube which is melting.
He said that the new BBX OS will come as a surprise for many people, helping it meet projections. RIM has already lost 68% of the value of its stock during this year, falling below the net worth of all its assets amid losses of market share to the iPhone and Android based devices.
The RIM management has been put under pressure by the humungous decline of the company to shake itself up, with many investors like Jaguar Corp, asking the company to split, sell or seek a merger. RIM, which was the pioneer in the smartphone market around ten years ago after releasing its first e-mail enabled phone, will increase its worth from its current capitalization in the market if it can combine with some other company, said Cooperman.
His New York based hedge fund called Omega bought around 1.43 million shares of the Canadian company in the last quarter. Cooperman also said that Michael Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, who are both co-CEOs and co-chairmen of the company, together own RIM stocks worth over $1 billion, which provides them with more than enough incentive to try to make the company successful again.
The Waterloo, Ontario based company posted its first ever decline in its quarterly revenue in more than nine years this September and is currently struggling in the transition of its current lineup of BlackBerry phones to the upcoming BBX platform. The OS comes as an attempt to regain market share from the users of the Apple iPhone, which is based on Apple’s iOS, and the Android phones manufactured by Samsung and HTC. The US market share of RIM in the US decreased to 9.2% during the third quarter this year from around 24% last year.
