setUoYouRPROFILE's blog: "tufui"

After a tumultuous summer capped by an activists fund’s call for a sale or breakup of the company, Research In Motion Ltd.burberry outlet cheap reports earnings Thursday expected to exceed sharply reduced expectations. Shaw Wu of Sterne Agee sees “decent” results on the strength of rising shipments of upgraded smartphones and the desire of phone traffic carriers “to support a viable No. 3 platform to fend off Google and Apple.” Scotia Capital’s George Papageorgiou expects a “much stronger” third quarter and said RIM will meet its ambitious annual earnings per share target. He cited positive factors for the Waterloo-based mobile device maker including lawsuits against rival handsets running on the open-source Android software. JP Morgan’s Rod Hall, however, called the recently launched BlackBerry 7 phones solid, but not enough to trump “rapidly declining consumer sentiment and potentially weaker demand.” Peter Misek of Jefferies & Co., who downgraded RIM on Friday to sell, cited “lacklustre” sales of the BlackBerry 7 models and rumors that the next generation of RIM phones using QNX software may be hurried to market. “Based on our checks, we believe the phone is being rushed and features are being stripped,” Misek wrote in a note to clients. “The integration of email/calendar is proving difficult, and we think a QNX phone without these would be a disaster.” Amitabh Passi of UBS added that RIM’s two main pillars of growth — international expansion and enterprise — “are increasingly under attack, and we continue to believe the status quo will likely be only good enough to just keep RIM in the game, but will not meaningfully slow its competitors.” RIM missed forecasts in the first three months of its fiscal 2012, trimmed second-quarter guidance amid falling prices and lower shipments in North America, and commenced layoffs to streamline operations. It has also sustained a series of executive departures that continued Tuesday with news that former BlackBerry enterprise server software vice-president John Vandermay has joined mining software firm Gemcom Software Inc. With high-end market share falling and RIM shares shedding nearly half their value this year, activist investor Jaguar Financial issued an open letter last week calling on RIM to consider options to increase shareholder value, including an outright sale or a spinoff of patent holdings. According to a consensus forecast of analysts, RIM’s net income in its second quarter will fall about 40 per cent from the same period last year to 90 cents (U.S.) per share. Revenue will slide 3 per cent to $4.47 billion — with both estimates at the upper end of the company’s reduced guidance. RIM warned in June that sales for the second quarter would be “heavily skewed” toward lower-end devices, squeezing margins. Wu expects RIM will report revenue for the quarter ended Aug. 31 in line with guidance and earnings per share three cents ahead of forecasts. “We have picked up constructive feedback on new BlackBerries,” Wu said in a report to clients. “We believe sales will be driven by upgrades in [RIM’s] large installed base of 55 million users as opposed to switchers.” Analysts, on average, expect RIM to ship about 11.8 million smartphone units for the second quarter — in the middle of the company’s forecast range. Shipments of the PlayBook tablet computer are expected at around 562,000 units for the three-month period, though RIM has not given a unit forecast for tablet shipments.