To remove Jim or Mike would be really difficult. At a capitalization of $23 billion, investors would have to fork over more than $1 billion to gain enough control to have any influence. Some analysts are suggesting it may happen with an activist, a person who invests in the company and attracts other like-minded investors to help gain control. One way to defend against an activist is to raise the stock value and make it more expensive to gain control of the company. In the past year, RIM has lost a quarter of its stock price, which now is very undervalued. It’s not clear if anything will satisfy the naysayers, or if they’re just out to slam RIM regardless of what it does.
According to Mike Abramsky, General Manager at RBC Capital Markets, RIM has sold around 250,000 PlayBooks to date. The claim comes from a note to investors that uses channel checks and states that sales have been steady since launch. According to Abramsky, RIM could move 500,000 units during the first quarter and it’s possible that new models will increase these sales. Even with the increase due to new models, it’s not clear if RBC’s earlier projections of 4 million units in 2011 and 6 million units total in the PlayBook’s first 12 months of availability will end up accurate. Nonetheless, it looks like the PlayBook is off to a decent start. So if you’re a developer wondering whether it’s worth porting your app to the PlayBook, this should help in that decision making process. Also, keep in mind that PlayBook users are starving for apps and are probably more likely to download and pay for your product.
Analysts are getting ridiculous these days: making far fetched claims about the smartphone industry without adequately justifying their statements. Most recently, analysts have taken to saying “BB is ded, go get iphone insted.” The barely intelligible statement will probably hit RIM’s stock again, which is already taking a beating. It’s statements like these that don’t take into account the fact that RIM is quarter over quarter shipping millions of smartphones and managed to weather one of the worst recessions in history. In any case, see the above video for evidence of analysts spreading their bias, without giving us any long term statistical analysis that proves their hard line stance against RIM and its products.
Citi analyst Jim Suva has turned 180 on RIM’s stock due to the recent news between Nokia and Microsoft. With Nokia adopting the WIndows Phone 7 OS, carriers are seeing Nokia (a sell rated stock) as unstable with an unrealized product strategy. Suva thinks that this will push the carriers to promote other devices such as BlackBerry, Android and Apple. Continue reading ‘Nokia and Microsoft Merger Could Benefit RIM Through Carrier Promotions’
Last week we wrote about Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu who was making the claim that the PlayBook’s battery life was under-performing, and that RIM would delay the launch of the PlayBook in order to find an adequate solution. RIM responded to the claim saying that “Any testing or observation of battery life to date by anyone outside of RIM would have been performed using pre-beta units that were built without power management implemented.” Recently, Shaw Wu reiterated the claim saying he would be “very surprised if PlayBook matches anywhere near the battery life of the iPad at 10 hours unless it uses a larger battery.”
