RIM CEO eyes ‘significant’ plans for Blackberry
NEW YORK: Research in Motion’s Thorsten Heins plans to waste no time in his new job. The Blackberry maker’s chief executive said he will present the board with his plan for company’s future in just a matter of weeks.
The German-bor n executive, who took over from two longstanding co-ceos on Saturday, said his plans for RIM would be “significant” though he did not divulge details in an interview with Reuters.
“I will have time with the board in two weeks to present my ideas and changes,” Heins said.
But the executive, who was promoted from the role of chief operating officer, said he has already done groundwork to tackle his company’s most pressing problem - persuading the U.S. market to covet the Blackberry again.
While RIM is growing in other countries, Heins conceded that its U.S. business is in need of a major revival after losing out to rivals like Apple Inc’s iphone at U.S. service providers and corporations, where it once had a clear advantage among employees heavily dependent on its email service.
“In general I wouldn’t consider RIM as a turnaround candidate. It is a turnaround candidate in the U.S.,” he said.
Heins’ quest to regain ground with these operators has been complicated by the fact that RIM had to announce in December that it is delaying the launch of phones based on Blackberry 10 - its next-generation software - until the later part of 2012 as it is awaiting the availability of a highpowered chip.
The executive would not say when exactly these phones would hit the market but implied that they would arrive in time for the year-end holiday-shopping season in the fourth quarter.
So in the meantime, Heins will concentrate on g etting the most cur rent Blackberrys into more consumers hands. He noted that only 20 percent of U.S. Blackberry users have the company’s latest phones, which he says are competitive with rival smartphones.
The rest of RIM’S U.S. customers have devices with older RIM software, some of which are “two generations behind,” he said. He is also betting on the company’s Playbook tablet to compete with the Apple ipad tablet. This spring, Heins said that RIM will launch a version of the Playbook, with a high-speed wireless connection based on LTE - a technology that the top three U.S. operators are building into their networks.
(Reuters)