Mikey Campbell
Canada-based RIM lost its top lawyer on Monday when Chief Legal Officer Karima Bawa announced she would resign, with her departure adding to the rising count of high-level executives leaving the company, reports Reuters.
Bawa's resignation is the second in as many weeks and follows that of Managing Director of Global Sales and Regional Marketing Patrick Spence. In early April, it seemed that Spence would be staying, but the situation at RIM was apparently too dire for him to remain.
A statement from RIM noted that Bawa, who has worked for the company since 2000, would be staying on long enough to hire and transition a suitable replacement.
The Waterloo, Ontario company is expected to cut a massive number of jobs through the year in tandem with launching new handsets built around the next-generation BlackBerry 10 operating system. According to sources familiar with the matter, RIM is looking to bring down its existing global workforce of 16,500 employees to about 10,000 by early next year. The layoffs will affect the company's legal, marketing, sales, operations, and human resources divisions, a source said.
CEO Thorsten Heins, who replaced co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie in January, is looking to salvage what is left of the once dominant smartphone maker and part of that change necessitates the huge layoffs.
RIM headquarters in Waterloo, Ontario. | Source: The Globe and Mail
RIM stock has plummeted some 75 percent over the past year as its share of the smartphone market dwindles against heavy competition from Apple's iPhone and handsets running Google's Android. According to the latest IDC data, BlackBerry shipments only accounted for 6.4 percent of the global market while Android and iOS took a combined 82 percent, shipping 89.9 million and 35.1 million units, respectively.
Amber Neely
Wesley Hilliard
Andrew Orr
Christine McKee
Oliver Haslam
Mike Wuerthele
William Gallagher
78 Comments
I'm sure all the people recently out of a job will appreciate your wonderful post. Companies falling like this is never a good thing and does nothing to make the industry better.
Failure is an absolutely natural outcome for any company out there; in fact, the principle of limited corporate life is at the core of any basic economics and/or law course at university level.
RIM fell because of mismanagement, lack of innovation and overall lax behavior, where they presumed that their extremely comfortable position in business telephony would continue forever (just like Nokia in the consumer segment).
Alas, in a world of (almost) unrestricted competition, it is more than obvious that some shall suffer while others thrive. Remember Apple in the late 90s? I do; absolutely every single media outlet out there proclaimed them dead - only to see the company come back with a vengeance. As for the now-unemployed people, I am sure most of them will be able to find a better job elsewhere (if they are qualified, bien sûr) - maybe not in Canada (a place not widely known for innovation, let's be clear); but most labor markets are global nowadays anyway.
So were the COCOCEOs keeping the company afloat, or have we not given them enough time?
If RIM pulls a rabbit, I will eat my hat.
I have a jelly hat. Just in case.
[quote name="fredaroony" url="/t/150328/rim-exec-resigns-ahead-of-massive-job-cuts#post_2116810"]I'm sure all the people recently out of a job will appreciate your wonderful post. Companies falling like this is never a good thing and does nothing to make the industry better. [/quote] It's a sad thing to be sure, but the title does seem appropriate. RIM had a fast rise, and now it's undergoing a fast fall. It had a half decade of pretty good fortune in between.