Research In Motion has reported a nearly 71 per cent decline in net income to $265 million for the third quarter ended November 27, 2011, primarily due to the recent service outage that hit users worldwide.
The company had posted a net income of $911 million for the three months ended November 27, 2010, Research In Motion (RIM) said in a statement.
RIM attributed the substantial decline in net income to the widespread internet services outage in October, which hit BlackBerry users across the world, besides the previously announced charge on its unused PlayBook inventory.
?The company experienced a service interruption which resulted in the loss of service revenue and the payment of service credits in the quarter totalling approximately $54 million, related to the interruption in the availability of the company?s network,? RIM said.
The BlackBerry-maker has also reported lower-than-expected revenues of $5.2 billion in the quarter under review, down 5.45 per cent from the same period last year. RIM had projected a revenue between $5.3 billion and $5.6 billion for the period.
Going forward, the company expects revenues in the fourth quarter of the 2012 fiscal, ending March 31, 2012, to be in the range of $4.6-4.9 billion. BlackBerry smartphone shipments are expected to amount to between 11 million and 12 million units in the upcoming quarter.
During the quarter, RIM shipped about 14.1 million BlackBerry smartphones and around 150,000 BlackBerry PlayBook tablets. The company?s cash, cash-equivalents, short-term and long-term investments stood at $1.5 billion as at November 26, 2011, compared to $1.4 billion at the end of the previous quarter.
