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Research In Motion CEO Thorsten Heins isn’t too pleased with where his company stands at the moment.
“I’m not happy with the situation at RIM either,” Heins said in response to a question posed to him by CIO.com in an interview published yesterday. “Who can be happy and satisfied with where we are?”
Such discontent is understandable. Over the last year alone, the company’s shares are down nearly 74 percent. The decline is due to investor concern that plummeting BlackBerry sales and major layoffs are signs that even more trouble is on the way.
The most disconcerting blow came when RIM announced recently that it would push back BlackBerry 10 to the first quarter of 2013. The company said the move would ensure that the new operating system would deliver the right experience at launch.
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For Heins, the delay was a necessary evil. And although he’s dissatisfied with the way things are at RIM right now, he’s satisfied knowing his company now has “a path to the future with BlackBerry 10.”
“In January with the full touch device and the QWERTY coming, I think we will reinstall faith in RIM,” Heins said in the interview. “That’s what we’re working on. This is what our objective is, and when I’ve talked to carriers about the delay of BlackBerry 10, the overwhelming feedback was, ‘First, thank you for letting us know in advance. Second, Q4 is mostly a prepaid quarter anyway, lot of noise coming, actually why don’t we focus on a Q1 [2013] launch and make this a major launch in Q1?'”
But it appears that not all customers are so happy with the move. In fact, there may be a growing contingent among BlackBerry customers that is instituting contingency plans to make sure they don’t get burned if RIM fails.
“In the past three months there’s been a lot of concern that the BlackBerry platform won’t be around in the future,” Maribel Lopez, founder of Lopez Research, told Bloomberg in an interview published yesterday discussing how BlackBerry customers feel about the mobile firm. “It’s not unheard of for a large phone manufacturer to go out of business.”
Of course, Heins doesn’t see things going that way. He told CIO.com that journalists “will be writing that if BlackBerry gets its execution right and straight, then the company has a great future.”
