14 DAY TRIAL // Research in Motion, the maker of BlackBerry, is reported to plan hiring a great deal of new people, mainly looking to acquire some of the staff that other companies lay off during the economic turmoil. It seems that the mobile phone maker intends to hire about 3,000 new workers during this year, so as to increase its staff to 15,000 employees.
Although the entire mobile phone industry has been affected by the economic turmoil, it appears that some of the players also managed to see some growth during the downturn. Among them, Research In Motion saw its market share grow during the last year, and even during the last quarter of 2008, when things were not as good as expected for the market.
At the same time, RIM is reported to be one of the few Canadian companies that would actually register growth during these hard financial times. According to RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis, the maker is rather looking to register more growth than to seek ways of moving forward through the recession.
“This is the easiest time to say 'I have to be very careful and wind down my investments,'” Mike Lazaridis said in a recent interview with The Canadian Press. He added that “this is the exact time to invest - if you can - because not only is there opportunity, but there are lots of resources out there.”
A recent report published by Gartner shows that the company registered a market share increase of around 20 percent during the fourth quarter of the last year, reaching 10.9 percent, a market share mainly taken from Nokia. The growth rate seen by RIM has been higher than that seen by Apple with its highly praised iPhones.
The news comes at a time when most of the industry's largest players started to fire employees. Thus, Nokia laid off 1,200 jobs last year, while Sony-Ericsson sent home 2,000 people. The Redmond software giant Microsoft is also known to plan giving the pink slip to 5,000 people, or about five percent of its workforce.