On Thursday, Research in Motion released its latest financial results, and they were not pretty. For the quarter that ended for them on November 26, the company recorded net income of $265 million, a massive 71 percent decrease from the same period a year before. RIM's management also admitted that their next generation Blackberry smartphones, which will use their Blackberry 10 operating system, would not be out until sometime in late 2012, rather than the first half of 2012.
Investors didn't like what they heard and as a result, the stock price of RIM went down as much as 13 percent in trading today. RIM's stock is currently the lowest it has been in eight years.
During the conference call with investors on Thursday, RIM's co-CEO's James Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis announced they would take a big cut in their salaries. As News.com reports, Balsillie said, "To further demonstrate our passion, alignment and commitment to RIM's long-term success, both Mike and I have asked the compensation committee to make a change to our cash compensation, such that our salaries will be reduced to $1.00 per year, effective immediately."
This kind of move has been done before at other tech companies, most recently when Meg Whitman announced that she would only take $1 a year in salary as HP's new CEO.
However, even this token move at PR may not stop investors at RIM from wanting to kick both Balsillie and Lazaridis out of the their CEO roles. The company has lost market share for its Blackberry phones to the iPhone and Android devices. The Playbook tablet has been a massive failure. On top of that, a recent online outage that crippled many functions of the Blackberry phones most likely sent a number of loyal customers over the edge of commitment to the platform.
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