Clip of the Day: Pete Seeger
The bottom line for consumers is to think twice before buying a BlackBerry.
The news is mostly bad for RIM. This dire take is from Paul La Monica at CNNMoney. A sample:
The BlackBerry maker is now absurdly cheap based on any conventional metric. Shares fetch less than 3 times earnings estimates for its next fiscal year. The company is trading at about a third of its expected sales.
And RIM is well below book value, the price it theoretically would be worth if it liquidated and sold off assets.
The rest of the piece goes along the same lines. Eric Zeman at InformationWeek started his piece with the same sort of negativity, but at least he tacitly offered hope in the form of five steps the company could take in 2012 to right the ship. Yahoo!Finance at least was able to find an analyst (Scotia Capital’s Gus Papageorgiou).
The bottom line is that, at best, times will be tough for Research in Motion and RIM. Consumers, of course, have a different vantage point than analysts and investors. For end users, the key is whether the company will be around to support and service the devices that they buy. For investors, it’s the company’s value – no matter how it runs or what becomes of it.
Folks should take all this into consideration when buying a phone. Clearly, investing in a BlackBerry is not a lifelong commitment. The company most certainly will be around for the life of the device. The question, however, is whether the level of available apps and general support will begin to fade.
