Research In Motion has suffered immensely over the course of this year, and analysts generally haven't helped its cause.
But the Canada-based supplier of BlackBerry devices to roughly 70 million subscribers worldwide still has believers, even in the analyst community.
Yankee Group, the Boston-based research and consultancy firm, contends that the so-called "death" of RIM in the smartphone market has been "greatly exaggerated."
In a December report outlining predictions for 2012, Yankee Group forecasts that RIM will remain one of the top three smartphone suppliers at the expense of Microsoft – the proprietor of the Windows Phone operating system – and its partner Nokia, the world's largest handset maker.
Yankee Group predicts BlackBerry will account for around 12 percent of the enterprise smartphone market next year and exceed the number of phones based on Google's Android operating system.
"And while both Android and Apple iPhones will grow their shares of the market, BlackBerry users in enterprise will continue to vastly outnumber the roughly 4 percent of users who choose Windows Mobile or Nokia smartphones," Yankee Group stated in the report, "2012 Mobility Predictions: A Year of Living Dangerously."
"Why? RIM's reputation for security and manageability still carries huge credibility with enterprise IT managers and remains a safer investment for these managers than a new untested enterprise platform," the research firm added.
Yankee Group also asserted that BlackBerry customers in the consumer market remain loyal. BlackBerry's share had declined to 9 percent this year, Yankee Group conceded, but the firm anticipates that RIM will grow its share to double digits in 2012.
Microsoft's Windows Phone share is less than 6 percent and declining, according to the report. "Microsoft will have to spend hundreds of millions of marketing and advertising dollars to turn that trend around," Yankee Group asserted.
George Staikos, vice president for Web technologies at RIM, said Wednesday at a conference in Asia that the company had grown its BlackBerry subscriber base from more than 50 million this time last year to more than 70 million in 2011, ZDNet Asia reported.
RIM is hopeful that BlackBerry 10, its newly named and yet-to-be-released mobile platform for smartphones and tablets, will help revitalize the company, which has lost market share to Apple and Android and faced a number of other setbacks this year.
Earlier this week, the company revealed that it wouldn't meet its revenue guidance, thanks partly to lackluster sales of its PlayBook tablet computer.
