What Were You Expecting? →

Chris Ziegler, in The Verge, on RIM’s quarterly results. No spoiler alert; you knew this already:

RIM has just announced its earnings for its fiscal fourth quarter of 2012, and as expected, they’re not good: the company lost $125 million before adjustments on revenue of $4.2 billion. That revenue is down 19 percent from the third quarter. Its BlackBerry smartphone shipments aren’t doing so well either: in Q4, RIM shipped 11.1 million, down 21 percent from Q3. Due to its weak sales and focus on building a BlackBerry 7 subscriber base in the next year, RIM also says it won’t be giving public projections of how much it plans to make from phone sales for the upcoming quarters. That frees RIM from short-term pressure to meet specific goals, but it also means the company is expecting some poor numbers in the near future.

Matt Richman illustrates how bad this using using RIM’s nosediving ASP. But maybe CEO Thorstein Heins actually has a handle on this. He’s both considering a sale and seems to be conducting a bloodletting. Both are good signs of rational management. Too little, too late, probably. But I think Heins may come out of this surprisingly well. The blame for RIM isn’t going to be laid at his feet.