So much for RIM's brief PlayBook sales "surge" to "4.9% of the tablet market": The company's losing market share "much faster than expected to rivals Apple and Google," reports Reuters this morning.
RIM took another bath in red ink yesterday, when it revealed its quarterly profits had plummeted, sending the company's shares tumbling in after hours trading. The disappointing quarterly earnings report was RIM's third in a row, too, bottoming out the company's already downgraded yearlong outlook.
Analysts paint a bleak picture for RIM, telling Reuters the company's hemorrhaging has spread internationally (referencing slowdown in the U.K.), accusing RIM of being in "blatant denial" and claiming that RIM's already very pessimistic full year outlook isn't pessimistic enough.
"The co-CEOs do not recognize the failure of the Playbook and continue to sell its merits in terms of security," said Sanders Bernstein analyst Pierre Feragu, pointing to a heart-stopping decline in PlayBook shipments—from half a million to just 200,000 in a single quarter.
Then there's National Bank Financial, one of whose analyst's calls the PlayBook "nothing short of a disaster."
"Our view is the company is garnering lower profitability on its service revenue, which is the monthly infrastructure fee charged to carriers based on the number of active BlackBerry subscribers," said National Bank analysts, downgrading RIM's stock from "sector perform" to a stinging "underperform."
But don't tell that to RIM co-CEO's Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie. In a conference call after RIM's earnings results were released, Balsillie spoke of a PlayBook software update dubbed "PlayBook 2.0," and Lazaridis claimed the company would be back in the black by the third quarter and going forward.
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