Research in Motion has not had a good business year so far as its Blackberry smartphones have lost market share to its rivals and sales of its Blackberry Playbook tablet have been under whelming. Now a financial group that owns some shares in RIM have asked that the company's board of directors to consider selling off the company or at least sell off its patent holdings in order to increase the company's stock price.
Bloomberg reports that the Jaguar Financial Corp is asking the RIM board to take over from its two CEOs, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, and launch a committee to begin to look into these options. Jaguar Financial Corp claims it has a number of supporters, who currently control less than five percent of RIM's stock. Jaguar would not reveal how much of RIM's stock it currently owns.
RIM has seen sales of its Blackberry smartphones take a hit thanks to the increased popularity of Android-based phones as well as Apple's iPhone. In late July the company announced that it was laying off 2,000 of its workers. RIM has been counting on the launch of its first smartphones that will use its QNX operating system to help boost its revenues. However, those phones are not due for release until early 2012. Jaguar Financial Corp's CEO Vic Alboini is quoted as saying, "You cannot put all your eggs in one basket. The board should be saying, ‘What if these products don’t pan out?’ You don’t want RIM to turn into another Nortel." A spokesperson for RIM declined to comment on Jaguar Financial's statements.
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