Morgan Stanley rubbishes RIM over product delays

INVESTMENT RESEARCH OUTFIT Morgan Stanley is predicting bad financial results from Research in Motion (RIM), just days after RIM started selling its Playbook tablet.

The analyst firm is expecting RIM's earning reports to reflect its current product vacuum and said it will meet pre-announced shortfall predictions.

"Our FQ1 [estimate] assumes RIM ships 13.5M smartphones and 400k Playbooks," wrote Ehud Gelblum, an analyst at Morgan Stanley in a research note.

"We expect RIM to report first-quarter earnings in line with its 28 April pre-announced shortfall, reflecting the product vacuum until BlackBerry 7 devices," reads the research note.

"If recent blog speculation proves correct, the new Bold 9900 may not ship until September, while the remaining 4 devices in the BB7 (previously known as BB6.1) family may not ship until November, much later than the June/July timing the company had implied at its BlackBerry World conference."

If anyone at RIM is reading this between their fingers it might be time for a move to behind the sofa, as the research note gets worse.

"We believe RIM has now squandered nearly every opportunity and competitive advantage it enjoyed through ineffective R&D resource management, delayed product launches and misreads of the competitive environment," continues the analyst.

"With the 9900 launch now likely pushed out til Sept, the remaining BB7 phones now likely just launching in Oct/Nov, and new Playbook models on the way, we believe RIM may have run out of R&D capacity to launch its QNX handset in the CQ1/ FQ4 timeframe it was shooting for."

Things could improve at the firm if it continues to adopt the Android platform and announce support for it, said the analyst, and if it releases a new smart - nay superphone - early next year.

"Longer-term, we believe RIM recently removed key bear theses which we had been expecting by announcing support for Android apps on Playbook - albeit requiring developers to load apps into BlackBerry App World - potentially growing the size of its ecosystem by a multiple of 10x, and plans to introduce a QNX-based 'superphone' in early CY12." µ