Investors and shareholders of the company clamored a lot to handover RIM’s administration under the guidance of other rather than co-CEOs—Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie. The time demanded a new leadership and unidirectional administration to lead the company firmly in right direction. Finally, co-CEOs of the company stepped down from the position and made Thorsten Heins as their substitute.
Heins has a very tough road ahead but the support of Balsillie, Lazaridis, and the board will be helpful for him to rebuild the company’s position. He will have to play the role of leader to prepare outlines for structural and product changes in order to regain the market. He will also have to assure investors, customers, and shareholders to trust on the company. The folks have lots of expectation from Heins, and he will have to prove their hope.
RIM’s Q3 earning report in December was quite disappointing, and thereafter, co-CEOs—Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie—announced that they would work on $1 as salary to help the company to combat the financial woe. Lazaridis founded the company in 1984, and later brought Balsillie, both served the company for decade.
Before being chairman, Barbara Stymiest was director of RIM, while Thorsten Heins was COO of the company before take over to CEO in the company. The company had cut off 2,000 employees in June last year, and tried to focus on its promotion of the product. The intense competition and three days outage had eaten the company’s huge market share in previous year. The company is considered as the proud of Canada and it has ranked among top 100 employers in the country.
In a statement RIM’s founder—Mike Lizaridis—said, “There comes a time in the growth of every successful company when the founders recognize the need to pass the baton to new leadership. Jim and I went to the Board and told them that we thought that time was now. With BlackBerry 7 now out, PlayBook 2.0 shipping in February and BlackBerry 10 expected to ship later this year, the company is entering a new phase, and we felt it was time for a new leader to take it through that phase and beyond. Jim, the Board and I all agreed that leader should be Thorsten Heins.”
RIM has a great hope to regain the market with BlackBerry PlayBook OS, version 2.0 and BlackBerry 10, that’s why RIM has blown all of its effort for their updates promotion at CES this year. The delayed in BlackBerry 10 was speculated due to problem occurred with development to integrate the RIM’s software with the global network. However, Heins is expecting to release BlackBerry 10 this year, the video demonstrates Heins’ talk about the company’s state:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUFwhpcrCTw
The company has lost its stock price at the lowest value, and its total value is less than the the company’s worth price. The company’s PlayBook Tablet is nowhere in the market comparing to Apple’s iPad 2 and Amazon’s Kindle Fire, and its price cut-off effort ($199) also went to vein.
Is new CEO potential viable to reinforce the company after Mike and Jim?
