The Successful Investor Hotline – Friday, December 16, 2011

Article Excerpt

RESEARCH IN MOTION LTD., $13.97, Toronto symbol RIM, earned $667 million, or $1.27 a share, in its fiscal 2012 third quarter, which ended November 26, 2011 (all amounts except share price in U.S. dollars). These figures exclude several unusual items, such as a $356-million (after-tax) writedown of its inventory of unsold PlayBook tablet computers and a $40-million charge for the October 2011 BlackBerry service outage. On this basis, RIM’s latest earnings beat the consensus estimate of $1.22 a share. However, the latest earnings are down 26.8% from $911 million, or $1.74 a share, a year earlier. Revenue fell 5.9%, to $5.2 billion from $5.5 billion. However, revenue is up 24.0% from $4.2 billion in the second quarter. Hardware sales accounted for 79% of RIM’s revenue in the latest quarter, followed by services (19%) and software (2%). RIM shipped 14.1 million BlackBerry smartphones in the quarter, up 33% from the second quarter. It also shipped 150,000 PlayBooks, down from 200,000 in the second quarter…