Yearly Archive: 2010

and best wishes for good health and good humour in 2011.

Having said yesterday I didn’t know where share price was headed, I proceeded to predict there would be a major move either up or down once Research In Motion results were released today. Well, RIM was up $3 at one point and down $1 at another in after-hours trading, but then settled out a mere 2 per cent higher despite posting a 40 per cent improvement in profits and beating the estimate on guidance. Not so long ago, a year or two back, such powerful results would have sent share price higher by as much as 8 per cent. These...

I have no idea, unlike those analysts who purport to know everything, what the numbers will look like when Research In Motion reports third quarter earnings after the market closes tomorrow. All I know is that one side or another is going to be right and the share price is likely to make a major move up or down. The other thing I know is that things have come to a pretty pass when BusinessWeek (no stranger to bad times itself) takes to laughing at the co-CEO’s tie. What’s that got to do with anything? Meanwhile, if you want the...

Julian Assange is a hero; Julian Assange is a criminal. Those are the two schools of thought about the anarchist (we can all agree on that) who through WikiLeaks has released thousands upon thousands of documents from multiple sources. He claims all he wants is justice but what he’s done is illegal. I’m not one of those angst-ridden writers who sees conspiracies at every turn and claims Assange is all about free speech. The video showing the Eighth Cavalry aboard an Apache helicopter killing unarmed civilians and a journalist in Baghdad is one thing, but the most recent avalanche of...

Everyone of a certain age can tell you exactly where they were when they heard that John F. Kennedy had been shot. I can also tell you where I was on October 23, 2000 when I heard that Mike Lazaridis had donated $100 million to launch the Perimeter Institute. Not only was it the largest philanthropic donation ever made in Canada, the money was given in mid-career, a time when most people are still clambering for the top. As if that weren’t unusual enough, his name isn’t emblazoned on the edifice like some of those deathbed donors who desire a...

How’s my old friend Manulife doing 18 months after Donald Guloien replaced Dominic D’Alessandro as CEO? The first thing to say is that Guloien finally seems to be coming into his own. Share price has firmed up at $15, the annual investors day last week when analysts hear from senior officers went well, and the problem of hedging variable annuities seems solved – as long as equity markets don’t go into the toilet again. Manulife badly needs this newfound stability. Share price tumbled from $40 two years years ago to $9, rose briefly to $26, fell again to $12 and now...

Now that Industry Minister Tony Clement has said no to the sale of Potash Corp. and BHP Billiton has withdrawn its offer, nationalists like myself should feel happy, but I don’t. Rather than a hollowing-out where a head office was moved, what we have here is a hollow victory. It feels like your team won because the other side scored in its own net during the dying seconds of the game. Don’t get me wrong, this is the right outcome, but the wrong way to get there. Canada has the most open policy in the developed world when it comes...

The lateral arabesque by Jim Prentice from government to business augurs well for both worlds. The former minister of the environment will be able to guide CIBC in the ways of government and public policy without having to lobby or get anyone’s knickers in a knot over conflicts of interest, perceived or otherwise. Prentice joins a short, but distinguished, list of senior officials and politicians who have recently made a similar leap to the private sector. Others include Frank McKenna, Kevin Lynch and David Dodge. Fewer are the wandbearers who leave business for public service. Bank of Canada Governor Mark...

Don’t they read their own paper at The Globe and Mail? Hard on the heels of the speculative October 13 story on a possible acquisition of Research In Motion, columnist Barrie McKenna revisits the same topic again this morning. I wish I could tell you he had something new to say although he did try to clothe the old idea in the context of the takeover offer for Potash Corp. McKenna writes about how RIM is widely held, has a global brand, and makes a case for Ottawa to protect the Waterloo-based company. Yada, yada, yada. After declaring that Ottawa...

Last month, when Research In Motion unveiled PlayBook at the BlackBerry Developers Conference in San Francisco, there was no demo. The co-CEOs, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, had done this sort of tapdance before. In the pre-BlackBerry days, when the then current model was called Bullfrog because it was so big, RIM came up with Leapfrog. It was much smaller, about the size of a deck of cards. In 1997 Mike and Jim flew to Atlanta to show Leapfrog to executives at BellSouth. But all they had were two wooden models, each with a plastic screen and a pasted-on paper...

Has Steve Jobs totally lost it? The cool guy in the black turtleneck who knows better than most how to market hardware seems to have gone a bit bonkers. On the release of excellent numbers today which showed Apple’s profit up 70 per cent on iPhone sales of 14.1 million in the quarter (compared with 12.1 million BlackBerrys) Apple’s CEO decided it wasn’t enough just to crow, he had to castigate. But first, the condescending warm-up lecture. “They must move beyond their area of strength and comfort into the unfamiliar territory of trying to become a software platform company,” said...

Everything you watch on TV these days seems to be sponsored by BlackBerry. Whether it’s Major League Baseball or Glee, Torch and BlackBerry Messenger are well and widely touted. The run-up to Christmas is, of course, a major time for retail sales, BlackBerry included, so promotional activity peaks. All this activity is just as well. BlackBerry is losing its ranking as top dog in North American smartphone sales. Although BlackBerry remains number one in sales by an individual brand, recent market share figures show it has been eclipsed by Android when you take into account all of Android’s iterations. To...

I like the redesigned Globe and Mail. Somewhere there’s a black-and-white photo of me, aged about six, crouched on the kitchen floor reading the Globe, spread out before me, so I’ve seen a few designs come and go. This was not one of the usual rejigs, where sans serif type was switched to serif and a few column rules were dropped in where they didn’t exist before. No, this was the biggest upheaval I can recall. Even so, there were those who dismissed last Friday’s launch as being derivative of The Guardian. All those naysayers were blown out of their...

Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie this week announced they will both be donating some Research In Motion shares to their respective foundations and selling additional shares. For Balsillie, about 800,000 shares are involved with half going to a charitable foundation. At $50 a share, that’s about $40 million. The gift by Lazaridis is larger. He will be divesting 1,050,000 shares. Of that, 350,000 shares will go to the foundation with the remaining 700,000 shares sold over an 18-month period plus additional shares until the value reaches $200 million. Some of the shares to be divested by the co-CEOs come from...

The release date is later than expected, the name is different, the location was a surprise … but no one admits to being caught off guard by the announcement yesterday about the new BlackBerry PlayBook. That’s what passes for reportage these days, I guess. To me, it’s interesting that Research In Motion is going after the Apple iPad from its core strength, the enterprise customer. Consumers will buy it, too, but I can see CIOs approving this device for corporate use because the back end administration will be secure, just like the BlackBerry. For office use, the two cameras will...