Apple overtakes RIM in smartphone sales on their home turf

[Shawn Knight]

Apple has knocked off Research in Motion as the top smartphone provider in Canada for the first time. Canadians have remained loyal to RIM through some hard times over the past few years but the troubled company based in Waterloo, Ontario wasn’t able to fend off Cupertino in 2011.

RIM shipped 2.08 million Blackberry devices in Canada last year, compared with 2.85 million iPhones in the same time frame. This is in stark contrast to 2010 where RIM sold over half a million more handsets than Apple. In 2008, Blackberry phones outsold the iPhone by nearly a five to one ratio. Bloomberg notes that sales in Canada represent about seven percent of the company’s total revenue.

As one of the largest global brands to emerge from Canada, RIM has enjoyed local support which makes it even more troubling that an outsider has overtaken them on their home turf. The downturn can be credited to any number of factors, but Alfred DuPuy from research firm Interbrand hit the nail on the head when he essentially said RIM didn’t invest enough in promoting their devices once the iPhone shipped.

It will be up to RIM’s new CEO Thorsten Heins to try and steer the company back in the right direction. RIM plans to give prototype Blackberry 10 devices to developers in May so they can get started on producing apps for the new operating system set for release this fall.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/47932-apple-overtakes-rim-in-smartphone-sales-on-their-home-turf.html

 

[Guest]

blackberry has smartphones?

 

[Guest]

Canada is awesome,
and so is apple

both tax you to death!

- an apple user from Canada!

 

[Guest]

It seems that us Canadian's are getting stupider and stupider... -_-

 

[Guest]

actually you are getting smarter, people from canada are finally realzing how shitty the blackberry phone is and the useless features it contains while Apple has much more to offer. Not only canada but i am seeing a big shift in demand for the Apple Iphone, for example in my country, Venezuela, one of the largest south american blackberry market focused points is starting to downfall and people are switching to androids and iphones. It justs people are starting to realize how shitty it is.

 

[Guest]

I personally think that RIM will be going out of business in about 2-7 years. Instead of adapting immediately to counter what Apple produced, they stayed on their current course. If RIM was looking out for the future, they would have kept the core part of what makes Blackberries special, which is their e-mail integration component and redesigned the OS 3 years ago!

It's very easy to see the personal value here in New York City when the upper and middle class use iPhones & Androids and the lower/poverty class are the ones using a Blackberry.

While they might be ideal for business, you give the other companies some time to adapt to that and RIM will be completely dead.

 

[princeton]

Man if RIM goes down they'll kill our local economy here in Waterloo. But what can ya do? Their phones suck.

 

[Guest]

Blackberry = "I am an office b*tch, slave, paper pusher" Or someone who thinks he is an important person.

@
"...actually you are getting smarter, people from canada are finally realzing how shitty the blackberry phone is and the useless features it contains while Apple has much more to offer. "

Agreed. Blackberry is a good business device and nothing more. For multimedia functionality and customization, it's garbage. It's also thick, has the smallest screen at times, still uses clunky keyboards with tiny keys and the whole BlackBerry image is just of being a slave in Canada.

I think Android or iOS or even Windows 7 are FAR better consumer devices.

 

[Guest]

This Canadian just made the jump from Blackberry to Android, after a single year on BB. It didn't take long after the switch before I realized that calling the Blackberry a "smart-phone" was a misnomer.

RIM did this to themselves. They failed to keep pace, and instead just rested on the support and image they had. Up until a couple months ago, I had hardly seen any advertisements for BB. Now the commercials on TV tell us how small business owners can't operate without their BB to send over a thousand emails a day, so I think they're still missing the mark. Far too little, far too late. RIM will be dead before the end of the decade.

As an aside, I've noticed a massive growth in Android devices, at least in my observation on the subway/bus and other public places. I see more Samsung devices than BB or iphones these days. In my office, which admittedly might be slanted as I work for an IT company, I'd guess that 6 or 7 out of every 10 smart-phones is an Android device now. I won't be surprised when Apple's stay at the top is very short-lived.