TORONTO —Research In Motion Ltd., losing ground to Apple Inc. and Google Inc., on Thursday delayed the BlackBerry 10 phone release, announced plans to cut 5,000 jobs, and posted a quarterly loss that was five times bigger than anticipated.
The stock plunged 22 percent after the company reported a first-quarter loss of 37 cents a share, excluding some items. That compared with the 7-cent loss predicted by analysts, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Sales tumbled 43 percent to $2.8 billion, trailing an estimate of $3.05 billion.
RIM, which stopped giving sales and profit forecasts last quarter, has failed to keep up with the capabilities of Apple's iPhone and Android devices, prompting customers to flee the BlackBerry platform. The company has been racing to introduce an operating system with better Web and touch-screen features — a lineup that now won't arrive until the first quarter of next year, more than a year later than originally planned.
"The delay may just be the final nail in the coffin," said Sameet Kanade, an analyst at Northern Securities in Toronto who has a "sell" rating on the stock. "This is not just a disappointing quarter, but is a big question mark about the company going forward."
RIM plunged to $7.14 in late trading after closing at $9.13. The stock had already lost more than two-thirds of its value in the past 12 months and had fallen almost 95 percent from its stock market peak in mid-2008, cutting its market value to $4.79 billion.
RIM's plummeting stock price has spurred investors to demand a shakeup, with some shareholders seeking a breakup or merger. In May, chief executive Thorsten Heins said ithat RIM had hired JPMorgan Chase & Co. and RBC Capital Markets to help evaluate its strategic options.
The company's share of the global smartphone industry fell by more than half to 6.4 percent in the first quarter, according to the research firm IDC. Android's share jumped to 59 percent, while Apple's iOS operating system accounted for 23 percent.
"Their business is being squeezed by Apple and Android," said Scott Sutherland, an analyst at Wedbush Securities in San Francisco. "I don't think a phone launch is going to change the decline they're in."
RIM had previously said that the first of the new BlackBerry 10 phones would come out in the latter part of this year. The product was originally expected in the first quarter of 2012. Pushing the BlackBerry 10 to 2013 means it could come out months later than Apple's iPhone 5 and products built on Microsoft Corp.'s Windows 8 platform.
RIM said it shipped 7.8 million BlackBerrys and 260,000 PlayBook tablets in its last fiscal quarter, which ended June 2. Analysts had projected 8.8 million smartphones and 280,000 tablets, according to a survey of 10 analysts. A year earlier, RIM shipped 13.2 million BlackBerrys and 500,000 PlayBooks.