Not long ago, it provided the textbook example of a company grown too big for its britches and needing a comeuppance, a once-great behemoth with its best days behind him. Recent months have seen Waterloo, Ontario-based Research In Motion (TSX: RIM, NASDAQ: RIMM) rumoured to be taken over by some of the bigger conglomerate of the information technology world, spilling oceans of red ink and laying off employees by the carload.
Events of the past week, however, may have modified that view. Tech investors took a second look at RIM after as they grew more optimistic about a February launch of the smartphone’s delayed BlackBerry 10 device.
BlackBerry 10— which will be unveiled at a Jan. 30 event along with its new line of smartphones — is widely considered a make or break product launch for RIM.
On Thursday, a National Bank Financial analyst said he was boosting his price target for RIM to $15 U.S. per share from $12 U.S., saying there was “more money to be made ahead of the 2013 launch of BB10.”
Earlier this week, prominent tech analyst Peter Misek gave RIM's new operating system a small but improved chance of success as he raised his target price to $10 U.S. from $5 U.S.; a far cry from earlier this year when RIM appeared poised to be swallowed up by the Apple’s of this world.
There have been repeated delays in bringing the new RIM smartphones to market and the company has suffered two embarrassing service outages.
RIM's latest outage was in September, the same day that Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) new iPhone launched in stores. In Oct. 2011, RIM's outage lasted several days affecting millions of users globally.
RIM CEO Thorsten Heins told reporters in mid-November that social networks such as LinkedIn, Foursquare, Twitter and Facebook will all have apps for BB10 at launch. But he declined to name any of the other big name apps that RIM will have on board come launch day in January.
Given all that, it’s been a remarkable week for RIM, whose stock cooled off Friday at $11.78 Canadian, after a 17% hike on Thursday. Prices had been as low as $9.00 on Monday.
In September, the stock hit a 52-week low of $6.10, after the latest outage took its toll. The peak for the last year or so came on December 1 of last year at $19.06.
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