Blackberry misses mobile Internet trapped Jobs Jobs had suggested its transformation

Blackberry is in crisis.

Recently, Morgan Stanley analyst Ehud Gelblum (Ehud Gelblum) said in the latest investor report, RIM company can only continue to survive the substantial reduction in size, he also RIM's stock from "Take shares and wait and see" down to "Reduce." Affected by these news, RIM's stock price closed down nearly 8% on Monday. Since peaking in 2008, RIM's share price has fallen by 94%.

A few days ago, news from the industry said that it may continue its efforts to survive. It is considering splitting the company into two parts, dismantling and disposing of the mobile phone manufacturing department, which is in a difficult position, and Amazon or Facebook as potential buyers. Prior to this, RIM announced the start of a new round of layoffs, the goal is to cut $ 1 billion in expenditure before the end of this fiscal.

RIM, the company that created this brand, missed the opportunity to start the mobile Internet. The communications terminal company started with enterprise-class services was lost in the era of consumerism in the electronics industry. Although it was 3 years ago, it was also rated by Fortune magazine as the fastest growing company in the world.

The investee organization believes that the "no cure" BlackBerry is still trying to turn over. This time, the BlackBerry 10 became a slammer weapon.

Painful transformation or a broken arm will be RIM's unknown.

The "season" crux of the series describes the poor state of the RIM.

RIM suffered a loss of 125 million U.S. dollars in the fourth quarter of last fiscal year, and operating income decreased by 25% year-on-year. Market research company NPD Group data show that RIM's US smartphone market share has plummeted from 44% in 2009 to 10% in 2011.

RIM still has 78 million global users, but RIM issued a warning last month that the company will continue to lay off for the second quarter to layoffs and employ bankers to help the company make decisions. This makes people think that it may have reached the edge of the acquisition.

In July last year, RIM had laid off more than 7,000 people, but this did not help it stop the decline. In the first quarter of 2012, the value of internal stocks soared by 18%, of which the Tablet PlayBook accounted for a considerable proportion, and this did not count the inventory of operators and channels.

IDC data shows that RIM's share of the global smartphone market in the first quarter of this year fell more than half to 6.4%. The share of Google Android rose to 59%, Apple iOS accounted for 23%.

Three years ago, RIM's profit growth rate reached 84%. What makes it fall so fast?

The loss of RIM was due to a “fruit war”, and the rise of Apple allowed its original stable market position to rapidly collapse.

The success of the BlackBerry was due to the needs of enterprise-level e-mail applications. In the case of the "9.11" incident in 2001, when the telephone systems in New York and Washington, D.C. were unavailable, it delivered timely information and became famous.

In 2007, RIM acquired 7 million users and increased at a rate of 1 million per quarter. It is already very keen, realizing that further rapid growth depends on the consumer market and it targets individual consumers.

At first Blackberry only added support for webcam and multimedia features. This was seen as a "sweet spot" added to the original corporate e-mail service. However, this gradual improvement has received good results and profits have been continuously increasing.

However, in January 2007, the birth of the iPhone broke all this. The iPhone has removed physical buttons, greatly expanded the size of the LCD screen, and the keyboard became the iPhone's software, which is one of the biggest advantages BlackBerry eyes have.

At that time, RIM's CEO Lazaridis was still not concerned about, he complimented Apple's excellent design, but that the touch keyboard is difficult to get public support. He believes that mobile phones will win by hardware. What he did not expect was that the BlackBerry, which was dominated by telecom engineers, had lost to the apple of the design-led Apple.

This may be the common elegiac of the hardware terminal vendors in the “post-Moore’s Law era”. The pace of the original progress of the consumer electronics industry was driven by technological advances and bandwidth expansion. Terminal vendors met the rigorous corporate needs to succeed; Apple, on the other hand, unveiled new rules, following the gradual failure of Moore's Law and the gradual spread of mobile broadband. Consumerism began to prevail, and consumer electronics terminal operators became the controllers of the game rhythm. In fact, Apple also used this to gain unprecedented dominance in the history of the industry.

Blackberry has finally been stumbled by its own slow pace of improvement. It found that even in the previously absolutely dominant corporate communications market, its control has begun to loosen. More and more corporate IT departments are beginning to accept Apple's products to access internal servers.

Transformation or sale?

BlackBerry tried to save itself. At the beginning of this year, they replaced the CEO candidate. The new CEO, Heins, promises to launch a brand new BlackBerry 10 system, integrate QNX system, and fully embrace the touch screen.

Moreover, this is still a piece of patchwork product, where the system and interface come from two companies that RIM acquired in 2010. When RIM acquired QNX and The Astonishing Tribe, new hope was pinned on it: QNX provided the system, and the interface of the new phone mostly originated from The Astonishing Tribe's technology.

RIM also does not have much choice. RIM, whose financial strength is not strong, can only hope that the BlackBerry 10 can win a chance for it, even though the industry remains hesitant: whether the BlackBerry 10 that completely embraces the consumer market and the shape of iPhone-like products can be accepted by new users, while the original users can Continue to support what they are no longer familiar with?

This determination is considered necessary. Steve Jobs, the key figure who took down the BlackBerry, had given RIM advice long ago. At the end of 2010, he said that RIM must leave the original gentle township and enter an unfamiliar area and transform itself into a software platform company.

There are also different sounds. RIM is facing a mess, but Alastair Sweeny, author of “Blackberry Planet” thinks RIM doesn’t need to change its direction: What they need is to stop the exaggeration and unfulfilled behavior; stop thinking that they are the center of the universe and return to serving customers well.

However, there is not much time left for RIM. Its market value has now fallen to around $4.9 billion, and one of the options to protect the interests of shareholders may be to sell.

At the end of May, RIM announced that it had hired bankers from JPMorgan Securities and Royal Bank of Canada Capital Markets to help them evaluate its business strategy. This has led to speculation that the public may sell Blackberry or will sell all or part of its business.

Manuel Minari, a senior strategist at Wolf Olins, believes that the BlackBerry patent is currently worth US$6 billion and has 78 million users, which will allow many bidders interested in it. There are even analysts who list possible buyers, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Samsung, or companies from China.

Morgan Stanley analyst Gelblum has also said recently that RIM is basically hopeless and will likely be split in the future. RIM's survival can only be compressed, shipping dropped to 10 million to 20 million units, becoming a niche mobile phone market only for high security demand market, so RIM needs to lay off 90%, the number of employees from 16500 people To 2,000 people.

"Blackberry's terminal brand is still very valuable, especially for Chinese companies." IT observer Lee Yi said that if you divested the sale of terminal brand business, RIM may be able to focus on strengthening its corporate services and system development and opening up. RIM has also made similar attempts before, such as external authorization of its mail service system. In addition, the instant messaging service BBM in BlackBerry devices is also valuable. In many countries and regions, it is regarded as a safe and convenient private information service tool, and is expected to strengthen social networking services based on this.