BlackBerry stock slips on India report
By Gurmukh Singh, IANSTuesday, February 1, 2011
TORONTO - Shares of BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) slipped about two percent Monday after India rejected its offer for partial access to its encrypted corporate emails.
Since August last year, India has been seeking access to BlackBerry encrypted emails to counter threats to its national security. Since BlackBerry encrypted emails travel between smart phones through RIM’s own servers and cannot be breached, BlackBerry has become the dominant enterprise smart phone globally.
The market slide in RIM fortunes Monday was also triggered by a report by Britain-based market research firm Canalys which said that Google’s Android has upstaged Nokia’s Symbian as the world’s leading smart phone software. But Android’s gains came at the expense of BlackBerry, the report said.
The British research firm said Android jumped a whopping 615 percent in 2010 from 8.7 percent to capture about 33 percent of the global smart phone market.
By selling 32.9 million units as compared to Nokia’s 31 million units during the last quarter of 2010, Android reduced RIM’s share of the smart phone market to about five percent, according to the report.
Barring Apple, RIM and Nokia, all smart phone makers, including Motorola, have now embraced Google’s Android operating system which comes free. Google doesn’t make its own smart phones.
Though the Waterloo-based (near Toronto) BlackBerry maker didn’t react immediately to India’s rejection of its offer of partial access to encrypted services, the markets reacted quickly as RIM stock slipped two percent in both Toronto and New York. The share closed at $58.99 on the Toronto Stock Exchange and at $59.11 in New York.
The bad news for RIM comes just days after it it was knocked out of the world’s top five mobile phone sellers by China’s ZTE Corp.
Tech research company IDC reported last Friday that the low-priced cellphone maker ZTE has knocked RIM off the top-5 list and pushed Apple to the last spot on on the back its surging sales.
Nokia, Samsung, LG Electronics, ZTE Corp. and Apple are the current top five smartphone sellers.
(Gurmukh Singh can be contacted at gurmukh.s@ians.in)
