Struggling phone Company Research In Motion the maker of the Blackberry mobile has seen it’s stock fall overnight to below it’s own book value in a sign that the market has lost confidence in the company and its leadership.
Struggling phone Company Research In Motion the maker of the Blackberry mobile has seen it’s stock fall overnight to below it’s own book value in a sign that the market has lost confidence in the company and its leadership.
Falling as low as $18.66, the BlackBerry designer was expected by Bloomberg to close below its “book value” of $18.92, or a market cap equal to what the company itself is worth in buildings, cash, device inventory, and patents, but without debts.
“The market has no faith in its current model, that is what the market is telling you,” Neeraj Monga of Veritas Investment Research said.
This year large corporates have started dumping the Blackberry phone for handsets from Apple, Samsung and HTC at the same time the Company has been plagued by network problems and a poor performing tablet. It has had to delay PlayBook 2.0 to February, leaving its tablet without vital features for almost a year, and has seen steep drop-offs in sales across all its lineup. The company had its most severe BlackBerry Internet Service outage at the worst possible time, losing access for almost four full days and getting access back the very day before Apple launched the iPhone 4S, which is known to have spurred at least some to switch from the BlackBerry to the iPhone that same weekend.
Analysts claim that the fall in book value could also affect any prospect of selling off the company. If below the threshold, companies might be hesitant to buy in as the consequences of having to sell it off may see the buyer take a financial hit.
Electronista said that Insiders have claimed that RIM staff thought that the iPhone was impossible. Publicly, RIM has at times been dismissive of touch-only phones and has repeatedly issued fiscal and product outlooks that proved overly optimistic, presuming that it would ship more phones or that the established BlackBerry market guaranteed a large base of PlayBook buyers, even without basics like native e-mail.
