RIM Claims It Can't Find an LTE Chipset, Delays BB10 Half a Year

From DailyTech: Waterloo, Ontario-based Research in Motion, Ltd. (TSE:RIM) tried to put on its most cheerful face reporting its fiscal Quarter 3 2012 earnings (calendar quarter 4 2011). The numbers weren't great, but they weren't worse than expected either, living up to analysts' somewhat grim predictions.

The biggest story was not the earnings itself, but the earnings call in which RIM announced its BlackBerry 10 OS would be delayed half a year. Wrote Canadian brokerage firm National Bank Financial, "RIM confirmed the BlackBerry 10 smartphones will be delayed until the latter part of calendar 2012. This could be game over for the BlackBerry franchise."

Nomura analyst Stuart Jeffrey in a research note to investors concurred that this could be the end for RIM or at least was a huge hit. He writes, "We see a high risk that this is too late to turn around RIM's position and believe the risk of further delays is meaningful. Even in the best case, however, it seems unlikely RIM will have large volumes of its BB10 devices on sale within 15 months."

RIM's co-CEOs, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, defend the decision to push the future of the company, well... into the future. They said that RIM would "bounce back" from "some of the most difficult times in the history of this company".

In the conference call Mr. Lazaridis blamed the delay partially on RIM's inability to find an LTE capable chipset, a somewhat astounding excuse given the volume of LTE chipsets. He states:

As I said on the last earnings call, we are focused on delivering a high quality, fully featured user experience when these products are launched. This means having a well-developed ecosystem of publications and services both in the hardware specifications, industrial design, and application features that will meet the expectations of consumers in the competitive US market. To achieve this goal, we need a highly integrated dual core LTE platform. The processor we selected offers industry-leading power and efficiency, and also allows us to deliver the industrial design that we believe is critical to the success in this market segment. This chipset will not be available until mid-2012, and as a result of this and certain other factors, we now expect our first BlackBerry 10 smartphones to reach markets in the latter part of calendar 2012.

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