Who is in the red, who is counting the cash, and who is milking a dead cow, asks Tech Sunday as it pores over this month’s balance sheet.
Wall Street is piling on the pressure on Research in Motion, maker of BlackBerry, to change its leadership as a profit collapse wiped more than $4bn off the company’s value. The leadership is made up of Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, who both have been joint chief executives for nearly two decades. The two are also RIM’s founders and each owns more than five per cent of the company.
RIM’s fortunes have suffered a very swift decline. Its revenues doubled over the years, peaking at $5.6bn in February 2011. Since then, according to Goldman Sachs, RIM’s global market share has fallen to nine per cent from 16 per cent a year ago.
HP has began layoffs at its mobile device unit as it winds down much of the operation that made the TouchPad tablet the company phased out last month.
Launched just three months ago, the TouchPad was billed as a competitor to Apple’s iPad. However, the device failed to take off, even when HP slashed the price of the low-end model to $99, which meant a loss of approximately $207 per device sold.
According to experts at Oxford Economics, the UK’s top retailers, including Dixons, Morrisons and Phones4U have lost up to £500m in annual sales by not tapping into their online sales potential, especially via websites and smartphone apps.
Morrisons, the UK’s fourth-biggest supermarket, has been especially slow in going for a multi-channel approach – in fact, Morrisons doesn’t even offer an internet shopping and home delivery service and only plans to launch a web-based food delivery service by 2013.
On the other hand, Tesco, which offers a vast choice of digital, web and phone-based services, is said to have made an extra £250m thanks to its online efforts.
The foundation that manages Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million gift to the Newark, New Jersey, school system will be announcing that some funds will be awarded directly to teachers who come up with innovative classroom programs.
So far, the foundation has allocated $6.4 million in grants, which have gone toward opening new schools, recruiting teachers and extending school days.
The foundation also has to raise money to match 27-year-old Zuckerberg’s gift – to date, the foundation has raised $47 million.
Overall, the Newark Public Schools District, which is state-controlled, has an annual budget of $900 million.
The research group IDC’s is predicting that the number of PCs that will be sold in 2011 will remain below 2010 levels. This shortfall owes to PC saturation in mature markets, economic fears and the increase in market share of competing devices such as tablets and smartphones. However, IDC still expects worldwide sales to exceed 500m by 2015.