Research in Motion was urged by Jaguar Financial's influential CEO Vic Alboini on Monday to spin off its wireless patent or sell itself outright, according to Bloomberg.
Jaguar has a stake of unknown size in the maker of BlackBerry smartphones and the PlayBook tablet. Alboini told Bloomberg that his recipe for RIM "has the support of several large shareholders who collectively hold less than 5 percent" of the company, according to the news service.
"You cannot put all your eggs in one basket," Alboini said, referring to RIM pinning its hopes on a new operating system, QNX, that the company plans to build a new range of smartphones and mobile devices around in 2012. He advised the smartphone maker to create a committee to study his proposal for either selling itself or spinning off its patents.
"The board should be saying, 'What if these products don't pan out?' You don't want RIM to turn into another Nortel," he added, referring to the Canadian telecommunications equipment manufacturer that filed for bankruptcy in 2009.
RIM's share price has plummeted in 2011 in the face of gains by rivals Apple and Google in the smartphone market where the Canadian company was once the dominant player and regarded as a top innovator. The PlayBook tablet that RIM launched this year to compete with Apple's market-dominating iPad has been largely considered a dud.
The BlackBerry maker had about a fifth of the global market for smartphones in the second quarter of 2010, but investors watched as RIM's market share dipped to just 12 percent in its most recent quarter, according to Gartner. The main gainers in the smartphone market have been iPhone-maker Apple and Google, which owns the Android mobile operating system used in a host of competitive devices.
Its slice of the global smartphone market fell to 12 percent in the second quarter from 19 percent a year earlier, according to Gartner Inc. Over the same period, iPhone maker Apple climbed to 18 percent from 14 percent, and Google's Android platform rose to 43 percent of the market.
RIM earlier agreed to consider a proposal by Northwest & Ethical Investments to shake up its leadership and said it would have an answer by January 2012. But Alboini said that plan was "woefully inadequate" and an "extreme example that management has not let go," according to Bloomberg.
Source:http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2392511,00.asp?kc=PCRSS05039TX1K0000760
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