BlackBerry Sales Once Again Push RIM's Profits Up, Up, Up

During its most recent financial quarter, Research In Motion (RIM) once again saw its revenues and profits more than twice what they were a year ago.

Revenue for last quarter, which ended in May, was $2.24 billion, up 19% from the previous quarter and up 107% from the same quarter of last year.

RIM's income was $482.5 million, or 84 cents per share, compared with net income of 72 cents per share in the prior quarter and 39 cents per share in the same quarter last year.

Wall Street Not Happy

To investors, it's often not how much money a company makes, but if it met their expectations.

Analysts had predicted RIM would see revenue of $2.27 billion and make 85 cents per share. Since its results missed expectations, RIM's shares went down 13.35 on Thursday, and down another 8.5% on Friday.

The company's predictions for its current quarter quite likely had an effect on this sell-off, too. RIM says its revenue in the current quarter will likely be between $2.55 and $2.65 billion. That's higher than the $2.44 billion analysts had predicted, but the company says its profit will be between 84 and 89 cents per share, while analysts had expected earnings to be 90 cents per share.

Strong BlackBerry Growth 

The revenue breakdown for last quarter was approximately 82% for devices, 13% for service, 3% for software and 2% for other revenue.  

RIM shipped approximately 5.4 million devices, and approximately 2.3 million net new BlackBerry subscriber accounts were added.  At the end of the quarter, the total BlackBerry subscriber account base was over 16 million. 

"As we prepare this summer to ship our 40 millionth BlackBerry smartphone, we continue to steadily scale our business and partnerships to support the opportunities ahead in this thriving sector," said Jim Balsillie, Co-CEO at Research In Motion.

During this quarter, RIM expected to begin shipping the BlackBerry Bold, a new family of smartphones.

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