Susquehanna Financial Group’s Jeffrey Fidacaro this morning offers up his view on the service outages of Research in Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerry, which started Monday and have occurred on multiple continents.
RIM shares have actually rebounded from an early sell-off on that news and are now up 16 cents, or 0.6%, at $24.57.
“Our view is that the longer this issue remains in the headlines and the longer users are without service, there is clearly an increasing risk of building negative goodwill and increasing the churn rate to other platforms such as iPhone and Android,” writes Fidacaro, who maintains a “Negative” rating on RIMM shares.
Fidacaro mentions in passing that it’s possible there could be some connection to the expected introduction next week of an update to RIM’s “QNX” operating system running on the company’s “PlayBook” tablet computer, though he can’t say whether or not that’s actually the case. RIM has said it will offer a major update to the PlayBook in conjunction with its developer conference starting October 18th.
Fidacaro thinks the QNX update is “critical” for RIM, as it will show the “feasibility of launching its QNX-based smartphones,” expected next year, and because “we do not see a potential acquirer considering RIM until it can prove it can engineer the cut-over to the QNX platform internally, as this would post a huge technology integration hurdle.”
A similar point of view was expressed this morning by Jefferies & Co.’s Peter Misek.
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