RIM Gets Questioned On Wall Street
While the Blackberry remains at the top of the push email market for the time being, Research In Motion is coming under ever-increasing competition from a wide assortment of other vendors as mobile email becomes a commodity offering. RIM's latest growth strategy was the release of the Blackberry Pearl, a device with multimedia features and a camera that was intended to open up the consumer market. Now, a Wall Street analyst says that indeed, the Pearl is selling well -- but it's cannibalizing sales of other Blackberry devices. Rather than growing overall sales, market share and user base, he says 60 to 70% of Pearls are being sold to existing Blackberry users. This is a bit of a problem for RIM, or at least its stock price. It enjoys a higher multiple than other mobile handset makers because it gets a monthly subscription fee from every Blackberry user; selling lots of replacement handsets doesn't grow that base. This isn't a new trend, either, suggesting that RIM's premium over traditional handset vendors may not be fully justified if it can't maintain subscriber growth.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team