Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

Today’s Company of the Day is Research in Motion.

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“Put the Blackberry down and back away!” Okay, we’re not quite to the point of armed intervention, but plenty of people do feel an obsessive connection to their BlackBerries. That’s just fine by Research In Motion, the Canada-based maker of the wireless e-mailing devices. The company was in the news again last week for all the right reasons when it announced boffo earnings and robust projections for the upcoming quarter. Considering that RIM’s revenues, profits, and profit margins have already risen steadily across this decade, that’s good news indeed. While RIM’s traditional stronghold has been among business users, an increasing part of its success is coming from the consumer side of the business; in the past quarter, for the first time in the company’s history, consumer subscriptions to the BlackBerry service grew even faster than business subscriptions.

While the BlackBerry was ahead of its time in delivering e-mail to mobile devices, RIM now faces stiffer competition from new generations of smartphones. To keep up its momentum in the face of these challengers, RIM is planning to introduce new software that will allow BlackBerry users to share calendars and other electronic files (including images and music as well as documents) while they’re on the go. This comes on top of RIM’s recent acquisitions of Ascendent Systems (voice mail and mobile telephony software) in 2006 and SlipStream Data (data compression and acceleration) earlier this year. BlackBerries also work in more places than ever, since RIM has expanded the geographic footprint of its services by partnering with wireless service providers across Asia, Europe, and the Americas. It’s a sign of the device’s broad success that many companies have now instituted “No BlackBerry” rules for meetings. Without rules like these, many BlackBerry users find that they just can’t tear themselves away from their electronic lifelines.

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