We're standing by. Our conference will begin shortly. In the mean time, why not check out our
earlier coverage of RIM's announcement?
Here we go.
Thorsten Heins has been appointed CEO, President and a Member of RIM's Board.
Getting through the housekeeping before Thorsten takes over and walks us through his vision for RIM's future.
Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie were the ones who recommended Thorsten as their successor, a decision which the Board unanimously approved after doing its due diligence.
Mike Lazaridis will serve as vice-chair to RIM's board and chairman of its new innovation committee. So he's focusing on what he knows best.
Thorsten taking over now from Barbara now.
"This is an amazing company with a passionate and loyal global customer base."
"When I came to RIM four years ago, it was because we're not just a device company, we are an integrated solution company."
"We are a network. We run services and we run devices."
"We intend to build on this heritage, to extend BlackBerry's leadership."
Over 75 million people are using BB services "every day." Over 55 million are using BlackBerry Messenger.
RIM had approximately 1.5 billion in cash reserves at the end of last quarter.
"Like all companies who scale and grow globally, we hit a few bumps here and there."
"I'm proud of our team for the progression we have made."
"Mike and Jim are visionaries who not only founded our company but also pioneered the whole smartphone industry."
QNX will form the foundation for the BlackBerry platform "for the next decade."
"BlackBerry 7 has been well received. We had the biggest launch ever in RIM's history, bringing 7 devices to the market." Thorsten is very proud of the entire team.
The reception at CES 2012 to PlayBook 2.0 was very positive, he says, and encourages him to think that RIM is on the right path.
"We are in the process of recruiting a new Chief Marketing Officer to work closely with our product and sales teams."
Thorsten will "focus both on short term and long term growth, strategic planning, and flawless execution."
He'll provide his employees with all the resources and opportunity they need, but will ask for accountability in return.
He's wrapped up his prepared remarks and the call is now being opened to questions from the audience.
Barclays Capital analyst: "Thorsten, which processes might be best for you to look at in your first 100 days or so?"
Thorsten: Market communication is one thing. RIM is growing very well internationally, but "the US is a bit different."
"We need to be more marketing-driven, we need to be more consumer-oriented."
So RIM's problem in the US market is simply that it's not communicating properly with them?
"The other element that I want to look in is more in execution area."
"The process of defining a product and executing a product" is the thing that needs to change. "We innovated while we developed the product" and that needs to stop. He wants to see execution and manufacturing happening "decisively" and separately from research, development and prototyping.
Next question, from Richard Kramer. Thorsten greets him warmly.
"What are your thoughts about RIM moving further down in price to capitalize on its growth in places like Indonesia?"
Thorsten: "The lower end, I call it the entry-level smartphone segment. We're not going to go into the featurephone segment, we only play in the smartphone segment."
"There's a huge potential there, that we can move from featurephones to smartphones."
"Do people jump from featurephones to the total high-end smartphone? Probably not." They need a device to bridge the gap between the two. Thorsten tells us that within RIM that's called "onboarding" users onto the smartphone platform.
Once users are hooked in, "we want to take them on to a journey to explore more and more powerful smartphones and then go on to BlackBerry 10 and move on to the sphere of mobile computing."
BB10 is "a whole new architecture."
"Totally newly developed environment: HTML5, native, Air Flash, CSS. We've had fantastic developer feedback."
"Playbook 2.0 and BlackBerry 10 will also have an Android player on it."
Meaning you'll be able to access Android apps on BlackBerry's new platforms.
Q: "You said that you thought QNX would prove to be the most important acquisition of the decade. What is it that gives you confidence that QNX will be so successful? What differentiates it?"
Thorsten: "QNX is not a developing OS, it's actually an existing OS."
"It is a proven OS and the beauty about the QNX OS is that it's a multithreaded OS. It allows true multitasking." He put an emphasis on "true."
"It's an extremely competitive OS as of today."
"I give huge kudos to Mike Lazaridis for acquiring QNX and seeing how valuable it is."
