Shares of Research in Motion (RIMM) are down 32 cents, or 1.3%, at $24.13, as the company contends with some ongoing service outages for its BlackBerry devices on multiple continents.
CNBC this morning reported RIM confirmed outages in North and South America, and Stuart Miles of Pocket Lint late yesterday reported RIM sent an email statement in which it explained that a “core switch failure” in RIM’s messaging infrastructure had led to outages in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India and parts of South America.
RIM posted an update to its services status, which says users in the Americas “maybe be experiencing intermittent service delays.” RIM says it is working to resolve the situation as quickly as possible.
Not helping things, Jefferies & Co.’s Peter Misek this morning again throws cold water on take-out speculation that has lifted the stock off and on over the last couple of weeks.
Misek, who cut his rating to Underperform on RIM back on September 9th, speculating the company may miss fiscal Q2 numbers for the quarter ended in September, today writes that any potential acquirers are likely to wait until after RIM is done rolling out its “QNX” operating system to its new phones. Otherwise, “they will not know what they are buying.”
QNX is expected to appear on RIM’s BlackBerrys sometime in the first half of next year.
Misek also thinks any potential buyout might have to wait till some get greater clarity around whether Microsoft’s (MSFT) “Windows 8” will be the “third mobile ecosystem,” he thinks. Windows 8 is supposed to debut sometime late next year.
Another problem with a buyout, writes Misek, is that at the moment, the subscriber base at RIM is undervalued because of the legacy investment of RIM’s systems in the Java programming language. When the company moves to QNX, it will move that infrastructure into a standard C programming environment, which would ameliorate the discount.
Misek also reflects on the difficulty of finding new leadership, even though firms such as Jaguar Financial have been militating for fresh blood:
While investors are very frustrated with [co-CEOs] Jim [Balsillie]�and Mike [Lazaridis]�we cannot think of anyone who could take over as a transformational CEO who has significant software expertise and clout with both developers and carriers. No one at Apple is likely poachable as they all have too many shares, options, and non-compete agreements. Extracting them would likely be prohibitively expensive. We believe Motorola Mobility’s (MMI) [CEO]�Sanjay Jha would be the best fit, but based on our checks he is highly regarded within Google (GOOG) and more importantly his ties to Qualcomm (QCOM) make a move there far more likely. Andy Rubin, the head of Android, would encounter the same issues as Apple executives. That leaves someone from Microsoft and searching through current and past ranks does not lead to a conclusive answer. [Ex-Microsoftie]�Robbie Bach may be interested but we have not heard whether he is interested in working again. We would also like to remind investors that current shareholders gave the existing management team and board a 90%+ reelection just a couple of months ago.
Misek’s objections are somewhat different from those offered last Friday by Sanford Bernstein’s Pierre Ferragu.
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