Late this afternoon Research In Motion Inc. (NASDAQ:RIMM) halted after hours trading of the company’s stock for a breaking new announcement. The company announced just after the market closed that the company has gotten involved with JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM) and RBC Capital Markets in order to perform a strategic review.
The firm has been facing sever difficulty for some years as it has failed to catch up with many of the advances made in the smart phone sector by companies like Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG).
According to the press release the company revealed that it had brought in the experts to review the firm’s financial performance and strategy. The firm is likely to report a loss in its first fiscal quarter of 2012 which would further hit confidence in the ailing cell phone maker. Such a result would not be unexpected however.
Before close the company was up over 2% in today’s trading and hit 11.23. Trading after the bell is still halted at time of writing and it is difficult to predict whether the market will see this as the RIM CEO put it as “a further…commitment to successfully completing our transformation” or whether they will see it as a harbinger of more chaos coming to the firm’s doors.
The note also left some hope for the future promising the company was still excited about the release of its Blackberry 10 software which is due later this year. The software has been postponed and pulled back several times since it was first announced hurting the firm’s market share as competing companies subsumed consumers.
Strategic review may mean anything to a firm that has shed much of its value in the last two years. This along with the firm’s performance as of late will worry the firm’s shareholders even more.
