The stock market had a good week this week with gains for all five days. But the stock price for mobile phone and tablet maker Research in Motion didn't fare as well. Bloomberg reports that on Friday the company's stock went down 19 percent after RIM announced that its profits had dropped drastically and that it had only shipped 200,000 units of its Blackberry Playbook tablet in the past quarter. In fact, RIM's co-CEOs, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, are no longer billionaires; the price of their own RIM stock has now gone down by over 50 percent so far in 2011.
The poor financial numbers, combined with RIM's lost market share for its Blackberry smartphones to Apple and all of the various Android-based phones, has analysts worried. The article quotes Matthew Thornton, an analyst for Avian Securities LLC in Boston, as saying, "They have been very late with the new products. They've missed their own forecasts. They've done nothing to reassure Wall Street that they're going to get more competitive against Apple and Google's Android products."
One thing that might help the company is increased sales of its Blackberry Playbook device. In a financial call with analysts, co-CEO Balsillie said that RIM would soon cut prices on the Playbook in the form of rebates. He didn't announce when these rebates would begin nor how much they would be worth. Perhaps RIM should simply cut prices without the need for a rebate; it certainly worked for HP to sell off its remaining stock of its now discontinued TouchPad tablet.
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