RIM has taken on the counsel of law firmĀ Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP to oversee a potential restructuring that could see the company sell off some of its billions of dollars in assets, or to license its patents. RIM has also expressed interest in potentially entering into a joint partnership with another company, which could see them moving away from building handsets to focus more on the back-end network infrastructure.
According to Reuters, RIM was in talks with many of the world’s biggest carriers to open up its network infrastructure to allow different kinds of data to pass through its compression-heavy pipes. Such ideas were likely propagated by former CEO Jim Balsillie, who resigned from the Board of Directors last month.
The company was also looking into creating a cloud competitor to Apple’s iCloud and Dropbox, two services which are gaining huge amounts of traction among mainstream users as individuals invest in multiple platforms and want to maintain a “perpetual state.” However many of these endeavours were dropped by the board as they feared losing even more market share by diluting the BlackBerry brand. Such is the reason why we keep seeing BBM for Android/iOS leaks, as they have been in testing for years but never moved to a finished product.
At this point it is not known whether RIM will seek out a banking firm to take on the financialĀ responsibilitiesĀ of selling off its assets in an attempt to get out of the red — the company reported a $125 million loss last quarter — but this move indicates that it is tightening its belt even further as poor handset sales affect even more of its bottom line.
Source: Reuters
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