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RIM May Need To Write Off $1 Billion In Inventory
benfrog writes "Blackberry maker Research in Motion may need to write off more than $1 billion in inventory, according to Bloomberg. The potential 'writedown' comes after RIM took a $485 million pretax charge to write down the value of its PlayBook inventory in December. RIM has said it aims to save $1 billion in operating costs this fiscal year by cutting its number of manufacturing sites and is 'reviewing its organizational efficiency' across the company, which may lead to job cuts of 2,000-3,000. Its shares have tumbled 75 percent over the past year and are down 90 percent from their all-time high."
I've used all 3 major platforms professionally, and BB is so far behind now it's just pitiful. Remove the Federal workforce from the client base, and BB is a memory.
HP is convinced they need to embrace the 'post-PC' world. They could actually salvage part of their 2 billion investment of Palm and Web OS. BB has a terrible platform right now and is dying, but they have a great brand name, and some great apps. Their mobile email client is absolutely the best.
If HP was smart, they'd reach out to Google to help develop Android phones and tablets with some Web OS influence (some great UI concepts actually) and a BB email client. Honestly, wouldn't that be a legit Apple killer than enterprise shops would embrace en-masse?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
by cutting its number of manufacturing sites and is 'reviewing its organizational efficiency' across the company, which may lead to job cuts of 2,000-3,000.
No need for manufacturing sites or employees when sales have fallen off a cliff.
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Well, if they are discounting Playbooks, I'm buying. Nicest piece of hardware for the price I've seen - already purchased 3 for family, and a blackberry phone makes a great remote control for it when you plug one into your tv.
I can only conclude that basically companies are just planting RIM hate and RIM apocalypse stories. I see them all the time. But yet if you actually used a Blackberry, as a smartphone (and not an App machine) it's pretty damn good. But yet we see it day after day all these RIM hate stories. Besides, why would you want, as a consumer, one less competitor in the field. Because all that means is the remaining ones will compete less, charge more, and give you less features.
Don't believe the hype planted by companies and their collaboraters in the media. Forget all the rest of the crap--if it's a good phone and you like it, buy it. And even though I use an Android phone now, I absolutely LOVED my two old BB's (old BB and that BB Bold 9700).
I think that RIM would have a better shot at survival if they abandoned their BBOS Operating System in favor of partnering with Google to produce a Blackberry that runs Android with all of the most popular services that Blackberry provides ported to Android. This may seem like a crazy move for them this late in the game but if a Blackberry that had good specs that also ran Android would seriously be a great device to have, since Blackberries usually had excellent build quality as well as enterprise support. If RIM could replicate what made them popular pre iOS and Android on the Android platform I could seriously believe that this company would have a fighting chance as a corporate Android Smartphone company.
Still, old people like me who like real keyboards may hope to pick up a 9900 or a 9790 for silly money later this year. The 9790 is a small, convenient, well built and specified phone which would have been eye-opening - in 2010.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Apple 2003
Ok, it's one word and one number...
... among the remaining executives at RIM anyway. Elsewhere, nobody cares what they are doing.
RIM still made $3.64 billion in revenue last year, for $197.5 million in profit (a huge drop from last year, but they are still making money). RIM definitely could still succeed, but not like this. They are still a massive company with a huge name-brand, they just need to figure out how to use that. It may be unlikely, but I wouldn't mind seeing them succeed: more competition in the smartphone industry could be a very good thing. I'd hate to see it turn into a pure Android/iOS duopoly with no chance of a third competitor (Windows Phone... doesn't really count).
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
And now they're bringing in JP Morgan and RBC to do a strategic review of the company.
Maybe they can still salvage things.
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/05/29/rim-shares-halted-jpmorgan-rbc_n_1553968.html
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
What a monumental fuckup. Maybe they can focus on "high-security" devices for the government so they can stay profitable doing hardly any volume.
1. Sell failed product on eBay
2. Wait for community Android port
3. Re-introduce device with an OS people care about
4. Profit!
Although in the case of HP we seem to have:
3a. Introduce Win 8 tablet, go back to 1.
Maybe RIM can do better.
NY Times
Ironic that RIM is losing-out to the likes of Apple, by making the same mistake Apple did back in the dark days of the '90s, when it seemed like there was a new Performa out every week.
"Organizational efficiency" certainly sounds like job cuts. But hopefully it means RIM might take a look at its manufacturing efficiency, as well.
At Apple, Steve Jobs always invested heavily in modern, automated assembly lines for its products, because he realized that the problem of too much inventory is particularly risky for computer makers. If you think about it, technology products have relatively short shelf lives. You can't sit on a pile of inventory and sell it for the next few years, like you could if you were making hammers or dinner plates. By next year, your inventory of shiny gadgets might effectively be junk. So the key is to develop a manufacturing process -- and equally important, supply partnerships -- that allow you to manufacture products at an incredibly fast rate, so that you can respond to market demand rapidly. If the market wants tons of units, ramp up production. When it cools off, stop making more. Then you don't have to sit on so much inventory.
If RIM is sitting on $1 billion in inventory, it certainly sounds like it grossly overestimated the demand for some of its products at launch. But it also suggests that it either isn't paying close enough attention to the market numbers, or is unable to react quickly enough to them. Working on either one might save it some money.
Breakfast served all day!
On the plus side, at this rate it won't be long before RIM has no operating cost and is left with pure profit!
I had to "write off" 10 lousy BlackBerry Storms my small company bought 5 years ago.
From TFA:
Nowhere in that article does it suggest that 100% of the current inventory will have to be written off. A terrible writeup from someone who clearly has reading comprehension problems.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Continuing on the usability theme, I find that trackball like middle button difficult to handle. Doing things on an iPhone or Android (or even WinPhone) is just so much easier.
....does this mean?
But yet if you actually used a Blackberry, as a smartphone (and not an App machine) ...
So a Blackberry is a "smartphone" if you use it as a phone and presumably as an email device, but any other use isn't "smartphone" but is instead an "app machine", which presumably means stupid shit like Angry Birds and not useful apps, like a SSH client or a mapping client or something else.
It sounds like the problem Blackberry has is that it's not a very smart phone.
Unless somebody buys them first. No amount of reorganizing will help.
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The one that dropped $7 billion on trades recently? Oh dear.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
best pick it up before Christmas, I don't see them being around much after that. I would say the same for Nokia but I think the release of the Desktop Windows 8 will save their bacon, but they will be a owned by MS in the next few years I think.
Their inventory consists mostly of blackberries.
Good things RIM have:
Communication apps - BBM, email blah blah - people who have to get things done, like these (a lot).
Keyboards - If I need to type many emails, and as much as I like swype, I want a physical keyboard.
Company access - They were the mobile corporate tool, and as much as we hear about how android and iOS are making inroads into the enterprise market, these companies all still support BB and would (mainly) buy from them again. Actually I'd go further - the drive for the switch came from users asking if there was a BB alternative (not that IT suddenly wished to support a dozen platforms)
The problem RIM has is that their current complete solution is somewhat lacklustre compared to that of their competition. They also need to accept that people have already gone out and bought an android or iOS smartphone - and they will compare that device they already have to what RIM are offering. I do not know of anybody who has a corporate blackberry as their sole phone. I do not know of anybody, given the choice of a single device as a freebie from their IT overlords, who would take a BB over an iPhone or an android device. Sure the BB might be better for those work tasks - but being given an iphone at your employers expense feels like a lovely perk - e.g. "free iphone 4GS" is something you might attract applicants with, "free BB" just sounds like they're intending you to be online 24/7.
RIM need to open up to iOS and Android. They need a completely isolated and secure stack from dedicated VPN to pretty access clients that can be installed on anything. I'd happily let my employer install that little work sandbox on my own phone - this app is work, the rest of the phone is still mine (my current employers suggested Android client is rocking The next thing they need to do is produce a phone I'd actually want to own. Now I fully accept that they don't have the ability to produce a phone to compete with Apple or say Samsung - but there's a screaming shortage of "decent android phones with physical keyboards". I'd take a compromise on the screen (a minor one) and I'm of the opinion that the average CPU/GPU out there is 'good enough'.
I'm convinced somebody in RIM has pitched all of the above and it's been knocked back due to divisions full of VPs trying to guard their atrophying turf.
So
RIM need to fire a shit-load of people, not to save money, but to allow the company to achieve focus.
RIM need to stop pretending we all want their hardware - they'd have better luck selling a service, where they'd rule the market by default.
RIM need to produce a "BB experience" piece of hardware - on either Android or WM with a nice keyboard that will allow their devotees to carry on pecking away with their thumbs (and play Angry Birds).
Actually WM isn't a bad idea - MS pretty much bought up Nokia for the lovely hardware (I was very nearly seduced by that piece of polycarbonate loveliness and that silly-res camera is coming soon). Now just need to come up with a convincing reason to make us all switch...and exchange hard-wired into my hand would be a definite plus.
YEAH, FREE FONES!
... a Beowulf cluster of these!
"That's either incredibly asinine or the most brilliant troll I've ever read. Not sure which." -Anonymous Coward
It also helps if you can outsource this manufacturing to a place where you can treat the workers in a way that would be illegal in your primary market.
RIM didn't seem to be helped by this.
Oh wait, you meant APPLE. Except that Apple is the only company actually paying attention to worker conditions. Where are RIM's public investigations into worker treatment? Blackberrys could be built from the souls of 3rd world workers for all we know.
In fact, that would explain the first Torch rather well. *shudder*.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
But they forgot you can't win at the uninformed easily seduced consumer market that apple owns.
The problem with that theory is that a LOT of very technical people were the ones that adopted Apple laptops early and propelled them to success.
Similarity for the iPhone a lot of the early users I knew were very technical people who could understand the benefits offered.
You don't seem very technically inclined yourself or you would have observed the percentage of MacBooks at technical conferences/gatherings...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The beloved enterprise arenâ(TM)t that discerning; gutless decisions based on trendy psychobabble (anybody remember Six Sigma), targeted advertising (in flight magazines), and prestige (we have two E10Kâ(TM)s for serving email alone). Secondly, Enterprises are driven more by expediency than vision. You have a pile of Windows Admins; then Windows it is. The rep from vendor X has his tongue up your ***; you buy the latest crap from vendor X. CFOâ(TM)s cousin sells service Y; you get service Y. The Enterprise is neither innovative nor a stimulus for innovation.
From all the rumors floating around and recent news that RIM hired Apple iOS developers, it seems RIM is building a BYOD mdm solution. From what I understand they are looking to partition the devices, BB, iOS and Android. The secure enterprise partition can be managed by RIM's BES or whatever they call it. Not sure how they will achieve this, sandboxing secure partition or what, but it sounds good on paper.
Nice post :) There used to be good posts like this all the time. Then a few years ago apparently all the AOL people became slashdotters. oops getting negative sorry...
I love using BBM and because of all my friends on it, I want to stay with BB's once my contract ends. I do have WhatsApp on it too to chat with other phone users but prefer BBM. I've used Maps which was great and helped me find places around London quite a few times and used it as a car GPS guide several times... just needs voice directions and it would be amazing!
my only gripe is with the memory management. I can't remember what the internal memory size for the phone is but it seems woefully small. i've only installed a few themes and apps and it's left me with 26.2Mb of memory which means every other day I end up rebooting the phone because memory is running low! What's the point in me adding a 4Gb micro-sd card if it doesn't use that space? Everything gets installed on it's internal memory! And don't tell me it can't store in other locations because Nokia's have been able to do that for ages and if you happen to pull out the memory card whilst running a program stored on it - it merely kills the program... why can't BB do that?!
this issue is the only thing I have that would make me look for other phones. Although I enjoy playing games on my friends Andoid or iPhones, I know personally that I probably don't get much time to play on it and if I do, I'm happy with the games I currently have on the BB.
Leverage QNX for stability an power/cell consumption reduction and open the fucking platform api's up for applications already! Jesus fucking tits. You COULD SMASH APPLE WTF!?
You seem to think you know exactly what RIM needs, but you don't appear to have a clue about anything RIM had done in the past few years.
"free iphone 4GS" is something you might attract applicants with
You also seem to think companies are having a hard time finding qualified people. In this economy, it's an employeer's market -- they can already make outragious demands and offer lower salaries. Still, why you think a free phone will help them attract better applicants is a mystery to me.
Take a look at:
BB Mobile Fusion -- Unified management of multiple mobile device types (yes, including iOS and Android)
BB Balance -- Seamlessly splits work and personal use on the phone and enforces security between them. For example, try to copy/paste something from the work side to your personal side? It will deny access. It does this without a bullshit VM like the non-solution we saw for android a few months back.
They have a new OS -- well, it's QNX -- an amazing hard RTOS that puts other mobile OS's to shame in terms of stability, security, and performance. It runs nuclear reactors, it's beyond reliable. Couple that with RIM's new UI, which is astonishing (it puts iOS and Android to shame in terms of multitasking, messaging, notifications, navigation ... basically everywhere. Take a look at some of the things we've seen in the upcoming BB10 OS)
Oh, and they did lay people off -- including a major upper management overhaul. They've already shrunk, and with a good bit of their major transition to their new platform complete, I expect they're streamline a bit more.
Now I fully accept that they don't have the ability to produce a phone to compete with Apple or say Samsung
Why not? They can and do produce phones of quality at and above high-end offerings from Apple and Samsung (see the 9900). They have the better software now, years ahead of the competition, and they have more experience producing high-end phone hardware than Apple.
Iâ(TM)m certain those running IT depts would disagree; thats the whole point though, isnâ(TM)t it.
FWIW, QNX is an awesome choice; too bad RIM passed on using it for the original BlackBerry.
So many of you have said this. I wonder if it'll prove true after RIM is gone?