Is RIM Listening To The Wind of Change?
Riding with the recent Yahoo and HP CEO firing spree, RIM’s Canadian investor Jaguar Financial Corporation is calling for major changes in the BlackBerry maker’s governance. Jaguar Financial, which announced that it had the backing of shareholders that represent 8 percent of RIM’s shares, is advising the Waterloo, Ontario-based company to hire a new chief executive and chairman and to consider other methods to improve shareholder value.
“Our game plan is to gain the support of shareholders representing a significant number of RIM shares,” stated Vic Albioni, chief executive of Jaguar Financial.
“Our supportive shareholders approve Jaguar’s plan to negotiate, at this point in time, changes in governance and the pursuit of a value creation transaction.”
The various changes proposed by Jaguar also includes the sale of RIM, a merger, and breaking up of the company into three separate businesses.
RIM has been struggling since the start of the year with shares down nearly 60 percent. Although, shares went up last month when rumors of investor Carl Icahn spread. The BlackBerry has been way behind Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS in the mobile arms race. And recently, to add more woes, the company had a major BlackBerry outage across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
Amidst all the noise, RIM looks like it’s still alive and kicking and trying to survive the chaos. Just last week, RIM acquired digital content services provider NewBay for $100 million. NewBay provides cloud services for storing and sharing media and files, which means RIM will likely integrate this to BlackBerry devices and PlayBook tablet in the future.
Also, RIM is scheduled to host BlackBerry DevCon Americas 2011 on Oct. 18-20 in San Francisco, California. Rumor has it that the company is going to announce BlackBerry X or BBX for short, which is a new name for its QNX operating system. And no, it does not stand for No. 10 like Apple’s OS X. BlackBerry + QNX = BBX, get it?
Whether the new BBX will blow our minds and redeem RIM from its current state of misery, or the company finally succumbs to Jaguar Financial’s consistent nagging, we’ll find out soon enough if they’ll listen to the wind of change or not.
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