RIM plans to sell Newbay cloud services and other minor assets

Newbay is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, and specializes in developing pictures, videos and social networking tools for smartphones and computers. RIM bought the company in October 2011, hoping to prevent a steady decline in performance through a new strategy. It was reported that the acquisition was worth about 100 million dollars.

Rim declined to comment on the sales report.

Rim, a pioneer in the smartphone industry, has been struggling in recent years because its BlackBerry has failed to compete with Apple's iphone and a range of products that carry Google's Android operating system.

The acquisition of Newbay is an important plan for RIM's management to change the direction of the company and improve the revenue of its services. This needs to be done by attracting operators to use their information, content transfer, and smartphone analytics services on all smartphones.

Newbay owned more than 80 million users at the end of 2011 when it was bought by Rim. Newbay stores media content on its own servers, so it can provide services for all Internet devices, including mobile phones, PCs, and tablets.

But because of the pressure, RIM's former co-CEO Mack Lazaridis Mike Lazaridis and Jim Barsley (Jim Balsillie) left early this year. RIM's new CEO, Tosten Heins Thorsten Heins, has launched a strategic assessment within the company and has focused on a series of new devices that carry the BlackBerry 10 operating system, which will be released in the first quarter of 2013.

Since the helm of reins earlier this year, Haines has hired Royal Bank of Canada Capital markets and JPMorgan Chase to help rim assess strategic options.

Shares have fallen more than 60% per cent over the past year as Rim's market share has been eroded by rivals such as Apple and Samsung. It was reported in Friday that IBM was interested in buying RIM's corporate services business, which was up more than 6% per cent that day.

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)