Its not to anyone’s surprise that RIM’s stock this year has been less than stellar. Rumors of the company selling its self to another tech giant have been circulating for quite some time now. In addition, key personnel have left the company to pursue other endeavors. The results of all this are that shareholders are becoming more restless as they continue to see their shares fall.
Now shareholders are beginning to become more vocal about their investments with BlackBerry maker RIM. In a letter to the board, Vic Albioni head of Jaguar Financial, an investor in RIM, expressed his frustrations with the company, and added some pretty bold suggestions.
If you tuned into Research In Motions’s Annual Meeting of Shareholders, you no doubt heard the statements directed at Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis from a former Queens University student who has an MBA degree in marketing. To put it bluntly, he put RIM on blast for their marketing efforts but he also took the time to go ahead and blast analysts for some of their practices when writing articles about RIM and their stock. Have a listen to the audio below:
While I’m sure some folks will chalk this up to him being a BlackBerry fanboy, he made quite a few valid points in his argument and even came back to the mic near the end to say a bit more. Needless to say, his comments were met with great applause.
Usually the RIM annual meeting of shareholders is a relatively boring affair but this year it has been getting quite a bit more attention. There was enough hype to even convince Kevin from CrackBerry to over there and live blog the event. I got a chance to listen to the webcast while I was eating dinner and there are some great tidbits there. Here are the notes I took:
There are now 67 million BlackBerry subscribers
Of those there are 45 million BBM users
The 4G PlayBook is still on schedule for this fall
The BlackBerry Bold 9900 is Mike Lazaridis’s favorite device…
The PlayBook is being tested by over 1500 enterprises
It will be the first of seven new BlackBerry 7 smartphones this year
That will lead directly into the first QNX phones early 2012 (Thanks Don for pointing out that Mike said early 2012)
The BlackBerry PlayBook is a taste of what is coming for QNX phones
RIM had to skip a generation of phones to get their hardware up to par
Let me know if I missed anything! Derek also pointed out that Bla1ze managed to record a great shareholder who blasted RIM on not marketing and selling correctly but then made fun of the analysts bashing RIM while typing out their comments on a BlackBerry. All in all RIM managed to deflect most criticism and come out ahead with this meeting. Kudos to them! Now just hurry up and get a 9900 in my hand!
Night Hawk Computers Blackberry Alliance 