Waterloo, Ontario — Research In Motion (RIM) doubled its revenue and profit for the second quarter over last year due to strong upgrade replacement sales and continued expansion into international markets.
The company said it shipped a record number of BlackBerrys in the quarter, totaling 3 million devices, and added approximately 1.45 million subscriber accounts. RIM’s total BlackBerry subscriber account base is now more than 11 million.
CEO Jim Balsillie also announced a new BlackBerry Unite service and said the BlackBerry Pearl 8130, pre-announced by Verizon this week, will be available from other North American carriers later this fall.
BlackBerry Unite will be a free service that lets groups of up to five users share calendars, pictures, music, documents and desktop content through BlackBerry smartphones.
The new CDMA EV-DO BlackBerry Pearl 8130 offers advanced features including a 2-megapixel. camera with 5x digital zoom and a new Web page view option that displays a full Web page on the screen along with a magnifying glass option that lets users point and zoom on a particular Web page. It also supports GPS with a local Google search and streaming video from web sites such as YouTube.
On an earnings call Balsillie said consumer (non-enterprise) sales of BlackBerrys are gaining with consumers accounting for half of the net new subscriber additions this quarter for the first time.
RIM said revenue for the quarter ending Sept. 1 was up 108 percent to $1.37 billion compared to $658.5 million last year.
Income for the quarter was $287.7 million compared to $140.2 million for the quarter last year.
Revenue for the third quarter of fiscal 2008 ending Dec. 1, 2007, is expected to be in the range of $1.6 billion to 1.67 billion, and subscriber account additions in the third quarter are expected to be approximately 1.65 million.
Basillie said, “RIM’s second-quarter results were exceptionally strong on all metrics including revenue, subscriber account additions and net income … We expect recent product and market initiatives to extend our business momentum through the remainder of the fiscal year.”
