Research In Motion Warns It Can't Reach Financial Targets

Research In Motion is just not having a good year. According to "RIM won’t meet targets, stock slumps" by Euan Rocha of Reuters.com, the company announced today "it would fall short of its financial targets after taking a huge charge to write down inventories on its languishing PlayBook tablet".

PlayBook is going to pull an HP move and will markdown the PlayBook with the attempt to get rid of inventory and bring up sales. The markdown will result in a “$360 million after-tax inventory writedown”. In the 3rd quarter 150,000 PlayBooks were sold and in the second quarter 200,000 were sold.

The global outage also didn’t help the company as many felt the company communicated poorly with their consumers about the outage. That incident resulted in a $50 million charge.

Between outages, PlayBook markdowns, losing smartphone market share (a shame considering the company practically ran the smartphone market), overly defensive CEOs, RIM has a lot they need to get over in order to recover. I just don’t understand how a company, which came from such a powerful position, couldn’t maintain that position, especially with two CEOs running the company. Shouldn't two CEOs perform better than one? If not, the company should get rid of one.