Research in Motion's Blackberry Playbook tablet appears to not be the sales success that the company was hoping it would be. RIM's latest financial results revealed that it shipped just 200,000 units of the tablet in its last fiscal quarter that ended on August 27, well below expectations from financial analysts. RIM also said that it shipped 10.6 million units of its BlackBerry smartphones during the quarter.
Jim Balsillie, the company's co-CEO admitted, "Overall unit shipments in the quarter were slightly below our forecast due to lower than expected demand for older models." However Balsillie went on to say "We successfully launched a range of BlackBerry 7 smartphones around the world during the latter part of the second quarter and we are seeing strong sell-through and customer interest for these new products."
Overall, revenues for RIM came in at $4.2 billion for the quarter, down from the $4.6 billion it received from the same period a year ago. Net income came in at $329 million for the quarter, well below the $797 million it had for the same period a year ago. The company said it is now putting its focus on releasing new smartphones in 2012 that will use its QNX operating system, the same OS that is running on the Playbook.
RIM has previously said it had shipped 500,000 units of its Playbook device. Today's announcement of just 200,000 additional units of the 7 inch tablet doesn't bode well for the future of the device, although at the moment the company doesn't seem to be planning to shut down production of the Playbook like HP did with its TouchPad tablet. RIM hopes to boost sales by of the Playbook by offering its users access to Google's Android app marketplace at some point in the future.
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