Storm clouds continued to gather around BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion, as the company followed a lackluster earnings report by revealing in an SEC filing that sales have fallen in all markets except the United States.
While U.S. revenues in the most recent quarter were up 10.1 percent over the previous quarter, international sales fell by 1.4 percent, including a 3.7 percent drop in the U.K. Even sales in Canada, RIM’s home market, dropped by 3.3 percent.
Wall Street has hammered RIM’s share this year as indications have grown that the BlackBerry, once a must-have workhorse and status symbol for millions of corporate executives, is struggling to survive in the new era of the iPhone and deluxe smartphones based on Android, the mobile operating system Google. RIM’s stock has lost 31 percent of its value since the end of March.
Those pressures were underlined by a recent smartphone brand-loyalty survey from Crowd Science, which showed that nearly 40 percent of BlackBerry users would switch to the iPhone, given the chance. One-third would choose a device running on Android.
Co-CEO Jim Balsillie has taken to talking up RIM’s prospects in glowing terms on recent earnings conference calls, pointing out last Thursday that the company will launch two new devices this quarter, and that BlackBerry 6, the new version of the OS, will be out by early October. Many analysts are unimpressed. Several commentators have noted that even as Balsillie was speaking, hundreds of people were lining up at Apple stores around the country to buy the new iPhone 4.
So far, the BlackBerry has continued to thrive as American IT directors continue to choose it as the corporate smartphone of choice. But "the clock is ticking" on BlackBerry’s business dominance, wrote Jim Suva, an analyst at Citigroup, in a research note last week quoted in Barron’s. That’s true even in the BlackBerry’s stronghold, the United States.
