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Technology

Research in Motion reports earnings

By Hayley Tsukayama,September 27, 2012

A logo of the Blackberry maker's Research in Motion is seen on a building… (MARK BLINCH/REUTERS )

Research in Motion’s report Thursday that it has reduced its losses and increased its revenue appeared to convince investors that the Canadian company’s plans for the future were sound.

The results weren’t spectacular by any means, though they did exceed analyst expectations of $2.5 billion in revenue. RIM reported a loss of $235 million on revenue of $2.9 billion. It’s significantly less than during the same period last year, when the company reported $4.2 billion in revenue. But the fact that RIM reduced its losses — last quarter they reported a loss of $518 million on revenue of $2.3 billion — was a mark in its favor.

Shares of the BlackBerry maker shot up after the market’s close when the company announced its earnings report, after closing up 2 percent in the day’s trading. In the minutes after RIM disclosed its latest financial results, the stock shot up 17 percent and well over $8 per share. RIM shares had hit a nine-year low this week on news of an outage in Europe and Africa.

The news comes as the company implores investors to focus on the next quarter, when the company is planning to launch a new operating system in an effort to wow its core users and make modest gains in its subscriber base.

Combined with the company’s strong presentation at a developers conference in San Jose, Calif., this week, the results appear to have encouraged investors to stay with the company.

Chief Executive Thorsten Heins said at that conference that the company is in a good position to come in third in the war for operating system market share, behind Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS.

To take that position, the company is pushing out its new operating system, BlackBerry 10, in January and promises devices will follow.

Since shifting its focus to software development, the company has all but halted rolling out new devices — a decision that showed in the earnings results.

Phone shipments dropped to 7.4 million from 7.8 million in the last quarter. Sales of the BlackBerry Playbook dropped to 130,000 from 260,000.

But with ambitious plans to roll out BB10 devices on six continents next year, the company is hoping to recoup some of those losses where it’s the strongest — with global enterprise businesses and markets outside of North America.