With all the doom and gloom surrounding Research in Motion a sign the company is still not out of the fight appeared yesterday. Reports and stats indicate that RIM has managed to defend its home turf maintaining market dominance in Canada. Canada the home country for Research in Motion has always been their strongest market and they appear to still be in control of the countries smart phone market.

However RIM's market share has dropped since last year, they remain in a dominant position for the time being but if they can't do anything its only a matter of time before they lose on their home playing field.

comScore vice-president Bryan Segal said "Canada is still a BlackBerry nation, BlackBerry still has the largest share of smartphones in Canada, but we see Android ... really growing significantly," Canada's market consists of around 8 million smart phone users but that number has been growing steadily over the past few years. Currently RIM controls 35.8% of the Canadian market with Apple nearly toe to toe with 30.1% and Android at 25%. Symbian looks bleak but managed to maintain a lead over struggling Microsoft with a share of 4.2% over Microsoft's measly 3.2%.

Segal said RIM's outlook isn't as bad as it appears "When you talk about market shares it always gets disguised as 'this company is taking this share' but across the board there's been so much growth on the smartphone side and all of these three major players are showing significant growth." Maybe RIM isn't as doomed as they appear to be.

With two new model's on the way and many new BlackBerry features in the OS. I mean the first all touch screen Curve smart phone BlackBerry is headed to the market, I am actually tempted to go with the BlackBerry just so I can support my countries company. Unfortunetly I know I need an iOS device or at least Android in order to launch my new business. Dang I want a BlackBerry Curve 9380 so bad.

Well what do you think as long as RIM can continue to dominate Canada are they still in the game? I mean even globally though they have been trounced they remain a capable competitor and aren't out of the fight yet. What do you think about the new models and the sales in Canada?

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Simple reason why they dominate Canada, have you seen Blackberry Data plans vs normal data planes, and how much of a discount RIM products are offered here in Canada. Another reason was due to the fact we did play some national pride here, but quickly that is turning around.

With that said, don't expect them to be market leader that much longer, as Rogers and Bell actually try to pick up decent phones at a better pace (within two-three months vs the past where you might see phones a year later after worldwide release on those providers).

Canada? RIM? Meh.

So RIM has a six point lead in Canada and lost six points in the last quarter. At this rate, RIM's "dominance" (why are you using that word at all here?) in Canada won't survive the year.

But Canada's just a tiny slice of the global market. RIMs been staying afloat by pushing into developing countries to offset losses in developed ones. But Android phones keep getting cheaper, and Apple keeps signing agreements with more carriers. RIM will lose ground in their new markets just as they did in the old, because its basically the same products fighting it out. This image tells you everything you need to know about how the smartphone market is trending:

http://www.asymco.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Screen-Shot-2011-11-23-at-11-23-3.13.44-PM.png

It's not too late for RIM. They have the resources to possibly turn this ship around. They just need a really clever idea or two and some really competent execution. But tell me, has anything that RIM has done in the past three years looked like a really clever idea that was competently executed? The first step is admitting they have a problem, and I'm not sure RIM's leadership has actually done that yet.

I was actually under the impression RIM was doing far worse then it appears they are. Yes they are third place but look at Microsoft's Windows phones or Symbian or any other phone for that matter, RIM is kicking the shit out of them. Also the fact that RIM is still holding on to 18% of the US market shows they are still a contender, no they aren't in a great position but they certainly aren't in as bad as I thought they were (Market share wise).

Everyone is right RIM needs to change their direction and admit a problem which I don't think they are doing. Their recent announcement of Android iOS controls (Which has me lost I didn't understand exactly what kind of compatability and control RIM is bringing to their phones) that kind of move could be ground breaking. Also the move to slowly adapt to the touch screen based phone ditching the famous keyboard shows that their phones may soon be on the exact same playing field as Apple and Android.

The problem I see is the emerging markets Apple and Android cannot take a massive market share in say Africa or India or even most of the middle east. Why? Because those area's are poverty stricken, I think RIM has a chance to dominate those markets by offering a cheap affordable BlackBerry.

I know BlackBerry's can currently be made pretty cheap and if RIM bought up say Datawind and got them working on cheap affordable smart phones for the developing world. RIM would have a secret weapon. Android and Apple couldn't possibly create touch screen centric smart phones to compete against cheap BlackBerry's in the developing world.

I think RIM's stubborness to remain a high end business phone company is whats hurting them. It used to be that those who owned smart phones were business people and they had both money to throw around and wanted the highest quality business phone. But today the average smart phone owner is not a CEO or executive its a spoiled rotten teenager or middle class young adult. RIM is not adapting to the market they are fighting the war the way they fought it in the old market, they need to adapt and they are failing to do so.

Uh-uh. Typical Joe.

Depends on how you look at things. In absolute terms, If you look at the composite index in that image I linked (the purple line, an unweighted average of revenue share, profit share, smartphone share, and cell phone share), you're right, Nokia has about twice the phone market presence of RIM and they are in third place

But if you look at the delta, RIM's market power has declined around four points, down 33% from their peak in Q2 2010. In the same timeframe, Nokia has collapsed fifteen points, or 50% since Q2 2010. We'll see if the new WinPho7 Lumias can turn things around, but right now, Nokia is dropping harder and faster than RIM.

If RIM goes down... Canada will only have Celine Dione and Justin Bieber left as their gift to the world...


can we blow up Canada? pllleeeaaassee?

lol Man had a good laugh I know its a joke so I won't get into everything Canada offers the world

Man people really hate Bieber and Dione, can't really blame em though I don't really like either of em either!

If you look at the deltas, there are Samsung, Apple, HTC, heck even Motorola and SE for you. Hardly makes a third place for RIM.

I'm not Nokia fanboy, so don't think I'm particularly worried about them. And Lumias (OEMed by Compal, lol) hardly will change the trend, they has nothing to differentiate themselves in the WP7 niche, even NAVTEQ of theirs now is a free commodity for all WP7 vendors.