BlackBerry maker, Research in Motion, had a couple of big announcements today. They had a great Q1 for fiscal 2008 bringing in their first billion dollar quarter coming in at $1.082, 16.3 % over the previous quarter and 76.5% over Q1 fiscal 2007. RIM also announced a 3-for-1 stock split which will take place on August 20th.
RIM stock (RIMM) soared in after hours trading up over $18 reaching $184.17.
I continue to believe the open end potential for RIMM is huge these next couple of years. The world is expected to have a mind numbing 3 BILLION mobile phone users by 2008. Their opportunity comes from the fact that RIMM has just 9.3 million subscribers out of a potential 3 billion. There is no doubt that the massive shift to smart phones is just getting started. People are moving up to a mobile device that can make a call, email, text message, take photos, listen to music, & surf the web. The newest Blackberry devices do all these things and far cheaper price than the Apple iPhone. I can see RIMM getting to 13 million users quickly (this year)…then increasing another 50% again next year. If (when) they get to 20 million users, it would still be less than 1% of the world market. In addition, RIMM has 2-3 new Blackberry devices coming out in the next 6 months (details are still a secret). This will continue to fuel their growth all over the world (never forget to think global with situations like this).
RIMM’s Blackberry’s are sold in 100 countries on 300 carriers.
The iPhone is sold in just 1 country (U.S.) and by 1 carrier (AT&T).
It took Research in Motion 5 years to get to 1 million Blackberry subscribers. It took 10 months to add the 2nd million. In the last quarter they added over 1.2 million. I expect this pace to continue to pick up steam and there is no reason the can’t start adding 1 million per month in the not too distant future.