Risk register · entry
Q1 · PredictableBlackBerry / RIM collapse
The iPhone shipped in 2007. RIM kept building keyboards. $70B in market value gone by 2012.
Documented, foreseeable risks that were ignored anyway. The failure is attention, not information.
Why this room
The disruptive information was public, dated and unambiguous: the iPhone shipped in 2007 and Android followed in 2008, both establishing touchscreen, app-ecosystem devices as the consumer standard while RIM continued to optimise for physical keyboards, network efficiency and enterprise email. RIM's own filings document the mechanism of decline (aging product portfolio, falling average selling prices, enterprises permitting employee-chosen devices) years before the collapse in revenue. This is q1 because nothing about the threat was unknowable or novel; the failure was in the allocation of managerial attention and the refusal to act on already-visible category displacement.
The record
- RIM's revenue from continuing operations fell to $11.1 billion in fiscal 2013 (year ended 2 March 2013), a decrease of $7.4 billion or 39.9% from $18.4 billion in fiscal 2012, with hardware revenue down 51.8%.certain
- RIM reported a net loss from continuing operations of $628 million ($1.20 per diluted share) for fiscal 2013, and a net loss of $235 million on sales of $2.9 billion in the second quarter of fiscal 2013 alone.certain
- More than $75 billion of RIM's market value was destroyed in the five years to 2013.high
- RIM's US smartphone share fell from 31.6% in late 2010 to about 16% by late 2011, while Android reached 47.3%.high
- The BlackBerry subscriber base peaked at about 80 million in the quarter ending September 2012 and had begun declining (to 79 million) by December 2012; global smartphone share peaked around 20% in 2009.medium
Sources
The book
This entry is one of 111 in the register. The full story, and what it cost the people who lived it, is in Risky Business by Claudia Zeisberger, David Munro and Joanna Reijgersberg-Siew.
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