RIM beats Q4 forecasts, adds 3.9 million subs

In an economic climate where its been mostly doom and gloom, it’s nice to see that a few companies still know how to do one very important thing — turn a profit. One company that has been able to consistently do this over many years is RIM, maker of the BlackBerry smartphone who yesterday released their Q4 financial results. With Q4 revenue 24.5% over that of the previous quarter and 84% above the same period last year, RIM took in a cool $3.46 billion with the bulk of revenue (some 83%) coming from handset sales alone as some 7.8 million devices were sold over the past three months ended February 28, 2009. All told, RIM can now tout a subscriber base of 25 million which helped propel its net income for Q4 ’09 to $518.3 million ($0.90 per share diluted), a rather impressive increase over the $396.3 million ($0.69 per share diluted) of Q3 ’09 at a time when both corporations and consumers, who now make up half of RIM’s subscribers, are slashing expenses left, right and center. As for Fiscal 2009, net income came in at $1.89 billion ($3.30 per share diluted), an increase of 46.3% from that of 2008. RIM is expecting to add 3.7 to 3.9 million subscribers in Q1 2010 with revenue in the range of $3.3 and $3.5 billion and an earnings per share of $0.88 to $0.97 per share diluted.

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