14 DAY TRIAL // We all know that RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook was one of the least sold tablets available in the market. Although the company slashed more than 50% off the tablet’s price, it still has a large stock of BlackBerry PlayBook units that might not be able to sell by the end of the year.
This is one of the reasons that RIM issued an official statement that confirms a $485M loss due to its low BlackBerry PlayBook sales. It looks like the company doesn’t think it will be able to regain it in sales.
This loss will be reflected in RIM’s next quarterly earnings report, along with another 50M that the company lost during its BlackBerry outage two months ago.
However, RIM is still committed to the BlackBerry PlayBook and thinks that “an increase in promotional activity is required to drive sell-through to end customers.”
“RIM is committed to the BlackBerry PlayBook and believes the tablet market is still in its infancy. Although a number of factors have led to the need for an inventory provision in the third quarter, we believe the PlayBook, which will be further enhanced with the upcoming PlayBook OS 2.0 software, is a compelling tablet for consumers that also offers unique security and manageability features for the enterprise,” said Mike Lazaridis, Co-CEO at Research In Motion.
According to RIM, the company sold around 150,000 BlackBerry PlayBook tablets in the third quarter, mostly during the new promotions launched across United States and Canada last week.
The Canadian company also promises that both consumers and enterprise customers who purchased the discounted BlackBerry PlayBook will be able to update their tablets to PlayBook 2.0 at no additional charge, when the update will be out in February 2012.
In the same news, Research in Motions reported that it shipped about 14.1 million BlackBerry smartphones in the third quarter that ended on November 26, which seems to be in line with its previous predictions of 13.5-14.5 million units.