Canadian Business magazine
For about 10 years now, Canada’s business experts have been waiting
for Research In Motion to fail. At the start of the decade, the
consensus on Bay Street held that RIM was insane to be trying to build
and market its own handset, going head-to-head against Goliath
competitors like Nokia, Motorola and Palm. Talk to most analysts and
they were dead certain that Waterloo’s nifty little startup, with its
cool e-mail pagers, would get crushed by bigger, smarter competition
from abroad. The only reasonable strategy would be to find a strong
partner and license their e-mail software in return for royalties. That
would have been a nice, safe little strategy, and soon enough one of
those big phone makers would have swallowed RIM whole. But Jim
Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis weren’t interested.
Once RIM
proved that the BlackBerry was a wildly popular revolutionary device,
more than capable of trumping anything Palm could come up with, the
concerns about patents arose. “Look! RIM doesn’t even own their own
technology! They’re doomed!” Well the patent wars dragged on, but in
retrospect, they were little more than a temporary (though expensive)
distraction. Now, of course, the experts are collectively preoccupied
with increasing competition. The iPhone is slick, fun, and its e-mail
capability is very nearly as good as BlackBerry’s. The Palm Pre is an
impressive smartphone in its own right, and Google’s Nexus One looks
like a formidable new player. All this has many claiming, once again,
that RIM’s best days are over.
Sometimes it seems we
Canadians just can’t bring ourselves to believe that we have a
world-class technology champion in our midst. Rather than tripping over
ourselves to predict its downfall, we should all be collectively
rooting for RIM’s success.
If Canada is going to develop the
dynamic high-tech industry we so desperately want, we’ll need champions
capable of winning on a global scale. Right now, Canada has precisely
one company that fits the bill: RIM.
Consider a few facts:
When we ranked the 100 biggest technology companies in Canada last
year, RIM stood atop the list with a market value of $45.7 billion. No.
2 was CGI Group, less than 1/14th RIM’s size. In fact, the market value
of companies two through 100 combined added up to less than
half RIM’s value. Now, there are certainly some very exciting small
Canadian tech firms on that list, but not one of them can hold a candle
to RIM’s reach and influence.
Between 2001 and 2008 (a
period in which employment in Canada’s telecom and computer industries
was essentially flat), RIM increased its labour force tenfold, from
about 1,200 to 12,000. And then there is RIM’s impact on tech research
in Canada. In 2008, the company spent roughly $383.6 million in the lab
— making it the country’s sixth-biggest private R&D spender. And
while most of the other big spenders were reining in budgets, RIM
increased its spending by 51% in one year.
Then, of course,
there’s the philanthropy. RIM’s top three executives donated $170
million to help establish the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical
Physics in Waterloo, which is fast becoming a global powerhouse in the
exploration of new scientific ideas. It’s exactly the kind of spinoff
benefit that helps foster a culture of innovation that will pay real
dividends for the future health of Canada’s knowledge economy.
When
Nortel imploded last year, we lost this country’s biggest R&D
spender, and a hugely important tech titan. We can’t afford to lose
another.
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I would like to cheer for RIM but my blackberry hasn't been that nice to me..
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