Tuesday events next mileposts as BlackBerry, Nokia map rebounds
May 13, 2013, 3:10 PM
BlackBerry Inc. and Nokia Corp. will offer consumers and investors peeks Tuesday morning at their latest efforts to rebuild their respective positions in the mobile-phone market, which the two companies dominated before Apple, Google and Samsung arrived on the scene.
BlackBerryQ10 as displayed on company site.
First up will be Nokia NOK +5.87% , which is hosting an event in London, at 10 a.m. local time (4 a.m. Eastern), to show off its latest Lumia smartphone. Leaks to some gadget blogs have pegged this one as the Lumia 925 — not to be confused with the Lumia 928 that Nokia announced last week as an exclusive for Verizon in the U.S. The Lumia uses the Windows Phone operating system designed by Microsoft MSFT +0.89% .
Later in the morning, BlackBerry BBRY +2.32% CEO Thorsten Heins will keynote the company’s BlackBerry Live event in Orlando, Fla. Heins will likely use the occasion to tout the launches of the company’s latest Q10 and Z10 smartphones, though which metrics he may share are uncertain, given that the company still has a few weeks left in its first fiscal quarter, which ends June 1. There has been some buzz that the company may use the event to launch a new phone, possibly a mid-to-low-priced version.
Both companies face the challenge of regaining share in a space that quickly and dramatically shifted toward Samsung (with Google’s Android operating system) and Apple. According to IDC, Nokia’s share of the global smartphone market slid nearly 55% in 2012, while BlackBerry, operating as Research In Motion, shed 36% of its market share. Even more telling was that neither company even appeared on IDC’s list of top five smartphone vendors for the first quarter.
Both stocks have been on an upswing leading up to these events. U.S.-listed shares of each are up about 17% over the past month.
-Dan Gallagher
blackberry, Lumia, Nokia, Research in Motion, Windows Phone
