A Summer of Soft BlackBerry Sales for RIM
For Research In Motion, June was a lot like May — another month of continued share losses in the States and slowing sales abroad.
Relating the results of his latest channel checks, Canaccord analyst Mike Walkley paints a pretty grim picture for the BlackBerry maker, which seems chronically incapable of stemming the consumer share losses it’s suffering at the hands of the iPhone and a multitude of Android handsets.
“Our checks indicated soft sales of BlackBerry smartphones at all four tier-1 U.S. carriers with the iPhone and Android smartphones dominating sales,” Walkley writes. “Further, our international checks indicated continued slowing sales for RIM in Western Europe, S.E. Asia and Latin America as aggressive pricing from Nokia and new low- and mid-tier Android offerings have impacted BlackBerry sales.”
So RIM’s in quite a predicament, and, sadly, it’s one that may not be easily solved — certainly not by the decidedly unexciting new handsets the company announced this morning. They might play well in enterprise, but the consumer market expects more.
Says Walkley, “While we do expect a solid upgrade cycle within RIM’s enterprise installed base for new BB OS 7.0 smartphones, we believe these devices will struggle to generate consumer sales or stem share losses to the growing iOS and Android user bases.”
[Image credit: The Joy of Tech]