TMCnet News
Shares in RIM rise on rumours of activist investor Carl Icahn taking a stake(Canadian Press DataFile Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) By LuAnn LaSalle MONTREAL _ Shares in Research In Motion shot up more than five per cent Tuesday on speculation that activist U.S. investor Carl Icahn has bought into the troubled BlackBerry smartphone maker. RIM shares rose $1.16 to $23.50 in afternoon trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange. The shares began to rise after a report from the Reuters news agency about analyst speculation on an Icahn investment, which was not confirmed by his investment company or RIM. Icahn has taken stakes in many big American companies _ from Motorola and Lions Gate Entertainment to bleach maker Clorox _ and usually forced them to restructure and become more profitable. Those shares then generally rise in value and Icahn cashes in on his investment. Earlier this month, a minority shareholder of RIM, Toronto merchant bank, Jaguar Financial, also pressed for changes at the company and said it should be restructured or sold. Research In Motion is failing in the "dynamic" consumer market and should consider putting itself up for sale or spinning off its patent portfolio into a separate company, Jaguar said. "The company is broken and it has to be fixed," said Vic Alboini, chairman and CEO of Jaguar, which holds less than five per cent of RIM's shares. Once a market leader, Research In Motion (TSX:RIM) has lost ground to Apple's iPhone and to smartphones with Google's Android operating system. RIM's new PlayBook tablet appears to have made small headway against Apple's iPad and tablets with Google's operating system. Two of Canada's biggest electronics retailers, Best Buy and Future Shop, as well as the Staples office supply chain have cut the price of RIM's PlayBook tablet by $100 ahead of a software update planned for the tablet. The tablet started selling at Canadian retailers in April with list prices at $499, $599 and $699 depending on the model, each of which have between 16 gigabytes and 64 gigabytes of memory. But the PlayBook has struggled, with RIM shipping only about 200,000 PlayBooks in its most recent quarter, about half of what analysts had been expecting and below RIM's own expectations. In late July, RIM announced it was cutting 2,000 jobs to streamline its business and lower costs. At the time, some analysts speculated the company should abandon the consumer market and focus on its bread-and-butter corporate and government business. At Motorola, Icahn pressed the company to split its patents from its cellphone business and cashed in when search giant Google paid US$12.5 billion to buy the business. Earlier this month, Jaguar proposed that RIM benefit from the "surge" of mergers and acquisitions among technology companies that hold patents with Alboini noting the "enormous" value of patents. It's estimated that RIM has 10,000 to 15,000 patents and was part of a consortium that acquired the 6,000 patents of bankrupt equipment maker Nortel Networks. (c) 2011 The Canadian Press |