Today was day one for Thorsten Heins as RIM’s new President and CEO. We’re gunning for the Canadian company and congratulate Heins on his new role – not the easiest job to take on and surely he has a tremendous amount of brand building to do. Heins started off the morning by outlining his strategy for the company – feels like there will be a great deal of “process discipline” over the next few months. Vague, yes. However, there are a few certainties: Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie are out of the day-to-day operations, but not removed; BlackBerry PlayBook is now “a new mobile computing platform” and OS 2.0 will be available in February; BlackBerry 10 devices will be launched later this year and will also be able to run Android apps; No plans to sell the company, but could be interested in licensing BB10. Finally, RIM has plans to hire a new CMO and increase their North American market share. With all this said the stock market reacted by a drop of 8.47% to hit $15.56. This was probably not the news the RIM execs and the board was hoping for.
Heins also said that “If we continue doing what we are doing, I see no problems of us being in the top 3 players worldwide in the next years in wireless”. RIM currently has 75 million subscribers, over 50 million BBM subscribers and $1.5 billion in cash… but much change is needed. Fresh new devices – smartphones and tablets – with a fresh plan of attack to acquire a massive amount of customers (consumer and business). We’ve put a quick poll together: How long will it take RIM to turnaround?
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