Despite incorrect press reports, written before Thursday’s Q4 and 2012 Year End investors conference call on Thursday was even completed, Research In Motion was quick to dispel rumours that they were abandoning the consumer market.
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Research In Motion has officially responded to these false interpretations today with a press release from their Inside BlackBerry Blog:
March 30, 2012 – Coming out of yesterday’s Q4 Fiscal 2012 Earnings Call, we’ve received comments and questions from our customers about RIM’s commitment to the consumer market. To be really clear, we are fully committed to the consumer market. In fact, we are aggressively focusing on delivering a unique and compelling user experience to all of our customers to enhance the way people engage, produce content, and manage data via mobile computing.
The consumer market is vast, so rather than trying to be all things to all people, RIM will focus its talent base and homegrown software and services on specific areas of the consumer market where BlackBerry® excels — which includes delivering a great mobile social and productivity experience – and we will look to existing and new partnerships to provide additional compelling apps and services that customers want and love.
We understand that buying patterns are rapidly changing for both consumers and enterprise customers. Smartphones are now just as likely to be purchased by consumers and taken into work to be used as their go-to work phone, as they are to be supplied by employers and used by employees on the weekend. We feel we are uniquely positioned to deliver a smartphone that consumers will be excited to use both personally and professionally that will also satisfy their employer’s needs for security and data management.
BlackBerry® 7 was a big step forward in this journey. BlackBerry® PlayBook™ OS 2.0 is another strong example of our commitment to delivering a powerful mobile computing experience. As part of the lead up to BlackBerry® 10, we will continue to seek partnerships with application and service providers to deliver consumer features and content that are central to the BlackBerry value proposition. We believe these partnerships, combined with our core product offerings, will provide an extremely attractive experience to both consumers and our enterprise customers.
We are excited about our renewed company focus and hope our partners and customers are excited as well.
If you have questions or comments, please share them with us. We promise to read them all and come back and answer as many as we can.
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@BBEmpireCanada was live twittering during the conference call, and at no point was it heard that RIM was pulling out of the consumer market. It would appear that certain news makers made interpretations based on already negative ideas of what the reports would consist of.
To hear a replay of the conference call, click here for BlackBerry Empire Radio.