RIM Passes 100 Million BlackBerry Mark

Hoping to push its way past iPhone and Droid X headlines, Research In Motion revealed its first quarter performance. How did the company fare? Pretty well, all things considered. Let's look at the numbers.

RIM says that its revenue climbed 24% over the year-ago quarter from $3.42 billion to $4.24 billion. On that revenue, RIM netted $768.9 million, up from $643 million in the year-ago quarter. The company sold 11.2 million BlackBerries and has now shipped over 100 million of the popular mobile email machines. What's interesting to note is that its subscriber base increased by 60% over the prior year to 46 million, with 4.9 million net new subscriber accounts added in the first quarter. After everything is said and done, RIM has about $3.27 billion of cash (or cash equivalents) in the bank.

"RIM achieved significant earnings growth and shipped a record 11.2 million devices during the first quarter, including its 100 millionth BlackBerry smartphone," said RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie in a prepared statement. "We continue to be focused on growing our business globally and we believe that the range of exciting new BlackBerry products being released in the coming months will create significant opportunities to accelerate RIM's growth in the second half of the fiscal year."

RIM has a more important quarter ahead of it. The company is preparing to release BlackBerry 6, the latest version of its operating system. This new version, which has been previewed, but not shown in detail, needs to make serous usability improvements if RIM want's to continue to sell millions of BlackBerries. Competitors Apple and Google have both recently refreshed their mobile operating systems, each adding features

Given the crush of people lining up at Apple Stores today for the iPhoen 4, Apple will likely sell 1 million new iPhones today or within the next few days. Strong demand will likely follow for the following weeks as the early supply chain issues are sorted out.

Google says 160,000 Android phones are being activated every day. Google and partners Motorola and Verizon Wireless just announced the latest flagship Android device, the Droid X. It is likely to be a smash hit for Verizon this summer.

RIM needs to deliver on both new handset(s) and new software to keep Apple and RIM at bay. The software is expected to debut some time this summer.