Research In Motion, makers of BlackBerry smartphones and related products, has not been in the headlines much with positive news in recent years. But the total number of BlackBerry users worldwide has, despite the bad news, kept growing, at least until now. With the new platform, BlackBerry 10, around the corner, promising new functionality and updated handsets, is there still hope for RIM? You can decide for yourself after going through these figures.

1. pingdom.com
BlackBerry’s
spectacular
decline

2. pingdom.com
Research In Motion, makers of BlackBerry
smartphones and related products, has not
been in the headlines much with positive news
in recent years. But the total number of
BlackBerry users worldwide has, despite the
bad news, kept growing, at least until now.
With the new platform, BlackBerry 10, around
the corner, promising new functionality and
updated handsets, is there still hope for RIM?
You can decide for yourself after going through
these figures.

3. pingdom.com
No doubt, the story of and reasons
behind RIM’s decline has been
documented plenty in other places,
and that’s not what we want to do
here. But we noted BlackBerry’s
dramatic fall in an article in June, and
we wanted to return to RIM and try to
look at the issue from as many sides
as possible.

4. pingdom.com
First, let’s look at how traffic to BlackBerry.com
has fared in recent years with Google Trends
for websites. As you can see, traffic was
actually increasing until about a year ago. Then
it leveled out, but has in recent months started
to decline.

5. pingdom.com
We can find another example of the site’s
popularity using Alexa. It’s Daily Traffic Rank
shows that BlackBerry.com has a global rank of
775 over the past three months. A lower
number would of course be better and the site
used to hover around the 600 mark last year
but is now close to 1,000.

6. pingdom.com
Google Trends for search reveals a similar
result when we look at RIM (the blue line) and
BlackBerry (the red). It appears the interest in
searching for “BlackBerry” has been in decline
for a year or so.

7. pingdom.com
A smartphone is a mobile powerhouse, and many are
used to browse the web. Even though BlackBerry’s
main claim to fame is mobile messaging and email,
many BlackBerry owners also browse the web with
their smartphones.
According to Chitika, BlackBerry devices were used for
just over 1% of mobile web browsing in the US in July
2012.

8. Statcounter shows a slightly more positive picture for
pingdom.com
BlackBerry and mobile web browsing, giving about 5%
usage share worldwide to RIM in July. However, that’s
quite a dramatic decline from the peak of almost 20%
at the end of 2010.

9. So far we’ve looked at soft numbers, like share of
pingdom.com mobile web browsing, but in terms of judging how a
company is doing, there’s nothing like counting sales
and market share. Looking at Gartner’s figures for
BlackBerry sales RIM enjoyed steadily increasing
numbers until the second half of 2010. Since then, with
a slight increase about a year ago, it’s not good news
for RIM. And this year, BlackBerry sales seem to be in
free fall.

10. The market share figures for BlackBerry OS from IDC
pingdom.com
seem to show a slightly less dramatic picture for RIM,
with its market share declining since early 2009.
However, increasing unit sales but declining market
share would seem to indicate that the overall market
grew much faster than RIM. This would most likely be
explained by the growth of primarily Android and iOS.

11. So, sales and market share are declining. As if that
pingdom.com
was not reason enough to worry for RIM, the
company’s share of the US smartphone market has
seen a dramatic fall in recent years. In fact, RIM’s
share of US smartphone subscriptions has fallen from
over 40% in early 2010 to just below 10% today.

12. pingdom.com Finally, let’s take a look at RIM’s share price over
recent years. As we write this, RIM’s share price
stands at $6.18, which, although better than Nokia’s
$2.74, is a far cry from Apple’s $686.90. Looking at
RIM’s share price of the last five years using
MarketWatch, you can again see that there is not
much good news for the Canadian company.

13. pingdom.com
Without a spectacular new OS and smartphones it’s
hard to see how RIM will pull this off and be able to
continue as an independent manufacturer for much
longer.
BlackBerry 10 is set to arrive early next year but will
that be soon enough? There is no doubt that there are
still scores of dedicated BlackBerry users that will hold
out for a bit longer for an improved smartphone. But
the question remains if it will be enough.
Based on the range of numbers we have presented
here, it’s hard to see anyone being really optimistic
about the future for the Canadian company.

14. pingdom.com
Sources
http://royal.pingdom.com
http://www.pingdom.com
http://trends.google.com
http://www.alexa.com
http://www.chitika.com
http://gs.statcounter.com
http://www.wikipedia.org
http://www.marketwatch.com