RIM announced their Year-End and Fourth Quarter results today, which you can read on the press release below the break. All in all it was a solid year for RIM when you look at the year over year growth in sales and subscribers, but the stock got beat up a bit in after hours trading as investors expectations were even higher. The two surprises here were the product mix being sold (higher % of lower end devices sold than expected) and that the carriers used this quarter to blow out more of their inventory from their channels.
On the investors conference call, RIM remained very optimistic about where they're at and where they're going. International markets are showing great growth and subscriber numbers in North America, where the competition is heating up, are still solid. Obviously RIM can't talk about unannounced or unreleased products, but on more than one occassion RIM's Co-CEO Jim Balsillie told the analysts on the other end of the line that they'll just have to sit tight to see what's coming and that he was happy with the outlook. Balsillie did mention that WES is coming up at the end of April and there will be quite of bit a news surrounding all parts of the BlackBerry experience (so hopefully we'll see device announcements, software announcements, enterprise announcements, etc.). At one point Balsillie said "if you saw the roadmap you'd be blown away" which leads me to hope we'll be seeing a lot of cool stuff from RIM before this new fiscal year is through.
On a funny note, at one point during the call when talking about some of the recent announcements at Mobile World Congress, Balsillie mentioned the the word "concierge app" along with items that had been announced/released. A little blunder perhaps, as of course we have not seen the personal concierge app get released yet or even acknowledge it as an app that will get released. We have seen screen captures of it pop up however though in RIM developer presenations (with some mistaking it as OS 6.0). But let's hope this means we will in fact see the concierge app get released by RIM. It looks pretty cool! Read on for the release.
