BE Bold Ad Campaign Deliver Half Billion Dollar Loss & 33% Sales Slump For Blackberry Maker

Research In Motion the Company that spent millions earlier this quarter spruiking a smartphone that won’t be ready till 2013 has reported a half billion dollar loss after their sales slumped 33%.

The only winners from their Blackberry “Be Bold” campaign appears to be the advertising agencies who raked in millions for a campaign that appears to have had little if any impact in the market.  

Maybe it’s RIM that needs to “Wake Up”

RIM who has bet their survival on their new phone which now appears to be a “lame device” according to one analyst appears to be diving straight to the bottom after their shares fell 17% on the news that they had delivered a $518 million loss and that revenue dropped 33% in the latest quarter.

The company has also announced plans to cut 5,000 jobs by the end of the fiscal year with some of those job cuts set to be made in Australia.

At a media briefing after the results announcement RIM Chief Executive Thorsten Heins said that their new BlackBerry 10 smartphones, which will run on new version of the Companies own software will now launch in the first quarter of 2013.

Mr. Heins said RIM’s engineers had made “major progress in the development of key features for the BlackBerry 10 platform; however, the integration of these features and the associated large volume of code into the platform has proven to be more time consuming than anticipated.”

In the latest quarter, RIM’s revenue plunged to $2.8 billion from $4.9 billion in the year-earlier first quarter. RIM said it shipped 7.8 million BlackBerry handheld devices in the latest quarter. That compares with 11.1 million in the preceding quarter and 13.2 million in the year-ago period.