RIM Market Share Heading Toward Zero

Research in Motion Ltd. (NASDAQ: RIMM) just cannot win in its competition against Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) and other phone makers using the Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) Android operating system. The company's delays for new products and a lack of anything new or exciting is putting its market share on a trajectory for its Blackberry operating system to literally have a zero market share before the end of 2013.

We recently featured RIM as a brand that would be dead by 2013, and here is more proof in the pudding:

comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) has now released data from the comScore MobiLens service that confirms the long slow demise of RIM. The report also shows by Apple is going after Samsung in such a strong patent case. The study surveyed more than 30,000 U.S. mobile subscribers and found Samsung to be the top handset manufacturer overall with 25.6% market share. Google Android continued to lead among smartphone platforms, accounting for 52.2% of smartphone subscribers versus Apple's share of 33.4%.

What the report sort of minimizes is how fast RIM is dying. The top smartphone platforms with a 3-month average ending July 2012 versus the 3-month average ending in April 2012 with those subscribers aged 13 and up showed a 2.1% decline in that short period down to 9.5% from 11.6%. Google gained 1.4 points of share to 52.2% and Apple gained 2 points to 33.4%.

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) saw its smartphone share fall by 0.4 points to 3.6%. The problem here is the rate at which RIM is losing its market share. That is almost a rate of losing one in five users on a static basis for RIM.

RIM sure appears to be on track to end up about successful as the other great Canadian technology story of Nortel.

JON C. OGG

Filed under: 24/7 Wall St. Wire, Telecom & Wireless Tagged: AAPL, GOOG, MSFT, RIMM, SCOR