RIM’s Financial Future Bright: National Bank Financial Analyst

RIM stock increase

According to Kris Thompson, an analyst at National Bank Financial (NBF), RIM will deliver more BlackBerrys, lose less market share, and boast higher earnings per share over the next few years. Sound like a pretty optimistic forecast?

In an article in Tuesday’s Financial Post, the author explains that Thompson attributes the expected success of RIM to four things: Nokia’s shift from its Symbian OS to the Windows Phone OS, RIM’s strong branding in international markets, the PlayBook, and the popularity of smartphones in general.

Thompson asserts that there will be ‘”customer hesitation” to accept Microsoft’s newest mobile OS. Not a tough forecast to make in my opinion. Nokia has a huge worldwide following but I can see anyone having problems embracing a totally different OS, especially when Microsoft is behind it. (Insert Vista failure details here)

RIM has a strong international presence, even with their lower end products like the Curve. Similar Android handsets, however have not fared as well. The cheaper Android smartphones do not perform as well as their impressive high-end counterparts. Without the necessary power, functionality suffers and first impressions disappoint.

The introduction of the powerful, QNX powered PlayBook tablet by itself should boost RIM’s bottom line. With the added possibility of running Android apps, forecasters predict even better results.

An interesting statistic in this article involves the popularity of smartphones. In 2010, 300 million smartphones were shipped compared to 350 million PC’s. I hadn’t thought about this before but it makes sense. The latest smartphones can perform much of the basic tasks that most people use their PC’s for.

Thompson’s forecasts seem quite optimistic, but I think they are grounded in logical arguments.  What do you think? Will the forecasts come to fruition? Or does this sound too good to be true?

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