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Research in Motion posted its Q1 results this week, reporting a 33 percent quarter to quarter drop in revenue to $US2.8b and a net loss of $US519m, compared to a profit of $US695m in the same quarter last year. During the quarter it shipped 7.8 BlackBerry smartphones and 260,000 tablets. The company announced that approximately 5000 staff would be made redundant, saving over $US1b in annual costs.
To add to the bad news RIM said it would delay until Q1 of calendar 2013 launch of the first smartphone to use the new BB10 operating system, being developed from the software of QNX, acquired by RIM in April 2010.
Announcing the delay the company said: "Over the past several weeks, RIM's software development teams have made major progress in the development of key features for the BlackBerry 10 platform; however, the integration of these features and the associated large volume of code into the platform has proven to be more time consuming than anticipated. As a result, the company now expects to launch the first BlackBerry 10 smartphones in market in Q1 of calendar 2013."
This is the second delay since BB10 was announced in October 2010 (originally as BBX). The company gave no launch date at the time but in November 2011 announced that the first smartphones and tablets to use the new OS would now not appear until late 2012.
Nevertheless, president and CEO, Thorsten Heins, said the company was "encouraged by the traction that the BlackBerry 10 platform is gaining with application developers and content partners following the successful BlackBerry Jam sessions that we have held around the world [in 23 countries by the time the tour ends] since the beginning of May." He added: "Similarly, the reception of the BlackBerry 10 platform by our key carrier partners has been very positive."
Far from positive has been the reaction of financial analysts that track the company closely.
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