Wal-Mart (WMT) Give RIM (RIMM) A Hand
RIM (NASDAQ:RIMM) has been under seige these last few weeks. Investors are concerned that the Blackberry maker is losing market share to the Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone and a new group of handsets using the Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android mobile operating system.…
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RIM shareholders are also nervous the Palm (NASDAQ:PALM) Pre sales could take a very modest but still damaging piece of the Blackberry market.
Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT) means to help save RIM.
Beginning next week, Wal-Mart will offer Blackberry handsets with a $100 gift certificate. Unlike the iPhone, the Blackberry runs on AT&T’s (NYSE:T) cellular network as well as Verizon’s, Sprint’s (NYSE:S), and T-Mobile’s.
The promotion is only meant to last seven days, but if it works well, RIM should offer Wal-Mart incentives to continue it beyond the holiday shopping season. RIM needs a new and larger distribution network to push the Blackberry and a set of incentives to pull in customers.
Wal-Mart can do that.
Douglas A. McIntyre
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.