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RIM’s Woes Continue
September 23, 2011 by admin
Filed under Smartphones
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PlayBook shipments dropped in half for Research In Motion during its second quarter, which also saw revenue continue its steep decline.
RIM shipped just 200,000 PlayBooks in the second quarter, down from 500,000 last quarter, when it started offering the tablet device.
Revenue was US$4.2 billion, hitting the low end of the company’s expectation and down 10 percent from the same quarter last year. Analysts polled by Thomson Financial expected $4.47 billion.
RIM’s net income was $329 million, or $0.63 per share. Adjusted net income was $419 million, or $0.80 per share. Analysts were expecting better: Those polled by Thomson predicted $0.87 per share.
RIM shipped 10.6 million smartphones during the second quarter. In June, RIM warned that the second quarter might be weak because of delays in shipping new phones. The delays meant RIM would miss the back-to-school sales period, negatively impacting sales, it said at the time.
Executives who spoke during a conference call to discuss the results put a positive spin on phone sales, however. The company only began launching phones running the new BlackBerry 7 software within the past few weeks, and so far it’s the “largest and most successful launch in our history,” Mike Lazaridis, co-CEO of RIM, said during the call.
EMC’s Data Breach Cost $66 Million
Between April and June 2011, EMC spent $66 million handling the fallout from a March cyber attack against its systems, which resulted in the compromise of information relating to the SecurID two-factor authentication sold by EMC’s security division, RSA.
That clean-up figure was disclosed last week during an EMC earnings call, by David Goulden, the company’s chief financial officer. It doesn’t include post-breach expenses from the first quarter, when EMC began investigating the attack, hardening its systems, and working with customers to prevent their being exploited as a result of the attacks.
In spite of the breach, EMC reported strong second-quarter financial results, earning consolidated revenue of $4.85 billion, which is an increase of 20% compared with the same period one year ago. Meanwhile, second-quarter GAAP net income increased by 28% from the same period last year, to reach $546 million. The company saw large growth in its information infrastructure and virtual infrastructure products and services, including quarterly revenue increases of 19% for its information storage group.
Those results led executives to increase their financial outlook for 2011 and predict consolidated revenue in excess of $19.8 billion, which would be a 16% increase from EMC’s 2010 revenues of $17 billion.