Investment bank says RIM condition continues to worsen QNX platform's bleak outlook

Berstein & Co analyst Pierre Ferrago (Pierre Ferragu), an investment research firm, published a study a few weeks ago in Beijing June 21, saying Rim's situation is not going to get any worse.　　But this week he changed the story. Ferrago expressed concern about RIM's poor performance last week and the company's management problems. "Four weeks ago, we cautiously raised RIM's stock rating to ' flat with the market, '" he said. In the next 12-18 months, we thought, RIM's earnings per share would not be less than 4 dollars a year. But we are obviously wrong, and this will happen within 3 months. "Rim is having trouble launching its new BlackBerry, but Rim has already surpassed market expectations for its slide rate," he said. In the North American smartphone market, for example, RIM's share has fallen from 54% in the first quarter of 2009 to about 11%. Ferrago believes it is hard for rim to get out of this dilemma, and the multiple delays in its products have exacerbated the crisis.　　Ferrago also pointed out that Rim's development of the QNX platform for future new handsets will take a long time to market, because rim cannot be saved. "We think the QNX strategy is not good," Ferrago said. In the current ecological system competition, the first advantage is very important. The first QNX phone will not be available until 2012, so it won't be able to get most of the key users quickly and become a competitive product. In the best case, RIM will have to go through one or two of generations to make the platform competitive and take 1-2 years to attract developers to pay enough attention to its ecosystem. By then, Apple, Samsung and HTC have controlled more than 80% of the smartphone market. The slow start of Windows Phone 7 also suggests that the opportunity window for new ecosystems is closing fast. "(D-Gold)