Research in Motion Limited Essay

In earlyish 2002, Chris Wornald, as the director of strategic alliances for bound, believed the tremendous synergy value offered from the acquisition of Slangsoft and its importance for lips future Asiatic grocery store. However, after his successful presentation on the deal to senior executives, one(a) piece of archived revolutionarys on Jerusalem Post got the attention from coasts director of legal affairs. The widespread panic and paranoia among Slangsoft employees, unrealized tax from HP and multiple registrations became a great concern. Thus, Chris Wornald had to accurately measure the benefits strand would form from Slangsoft and the risks associated with its exertion and corporate culture. Moreover, it is significant to draft a circumstantial action plan to help sass capture all the synergy if deal is set. In this case, four categories be detailed analyzed lip itself, Slangsoft itself, ternion alternatives and the detailed plan of action.Research in Motion hol d (RIM) Firm and its products Research in Motion Limited (RIM), trading as BlackBerry, was a hint designer, manufacturer and food groceryer of innovative radio set solutions for the cosmopolitan mobile communications market. Immediacy, security and ease-of-use were its pillar of competitive strategies. In early 2002, RIM and Hong Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa announced the commercial launch of BlackBerry operating in Hong Kong. To date, RIMs failment tendency boil downed on expanding the international reach of the BlackBerry solution, especially into the rapidly ontogenesis Asian markets where no such solution yet existed. In term of its products (exhibit 1), the best-known and close to(prenominal) profitable product was its Blackberry radio set solution, and a nonher 45% of its revenue mix came from RIM wireless handhelds, software development tools and embedded wireless technologies. To date, RIMs target customer had been snaped on enterprises, not individuals.As the pioneer in the filed of wireless data communication, RIMs products have the great features of weensy size, long battery life, easy-to-use, reasonable pricing, conciliatory architecture and a data security plan In modulate to master(prenominal)tain its leadership, RIM focused on the innovation of two-way wireless technologies and applications, adoption of its platform by wireless network service providers globally, and entertain its intellectual property. Throughout the operation, RIM remained responsive to end-user needs and continue to develop and market wind edge hardware and applications. Moreover, in order to elapse and develop its capacities, RIM had broadened the strategic alliances and relationship in order to conjure its competitive dumbfound. But, to date, the most emergent wireless capacity it needed was digest of localized Chinese input and display.Finance From 2000 to 2001 (exhibit 2), RIMs revenue grew 160% from $85 million to $221 million. RIM has an extreme ly strong rest period sheet after completing a follow-on equity offering in November 2000 that raised $ 590 million. Therefore, RIM has very strong financial assets for financing their growing opportunities. In term of one single item on correspondence sheet, RIM has $50.8 million liquid asset to finance any small valued opportunities, and the sales of new equity indicates the investors confidence towards RIM.People and elaboration Mike Lazaridis, RIMs CO-Chief Executive Officer, was a passionate advise for the power of basis science to improve and transform the world. With his engineering degree, Lazaridis is responsible for(p) for product strategy, research and development, product development and manufacturing. Jim Balsillie with more charismatic and forthcoming personality brought his riches of business knowledge to RIM. With such strong leading executive team, RIM had achieved a great employee growth by segment from Fiscal 1999 to 2001. (exhibit 3) Moreover, RIM has a w ell-developed corporate culture that celebrates achievement, creativity, and risk taking. Employees at RIM were well compensated and motivated by various benefits, at the mean composition, RIM is also famous for its corporate giving to the communities.Slangsoft Inc. (Slangsoft) Slangsoft, headquartered in Boston, was a small Israel-based company with majority of employees in Jerusalem. It had three main products a inwardness keyboard mapping engine, 52 language scalable vector slips and a predictive input engine. Its well-developed Intelligent Text Input and Display (iTID) engine room was essential for RIMs entry into Asian market. Many RIM competitors also desired this technology. Slangsoft has signed licensing deals with nine companies and was in the stage of talks with one cellphone company. Arie Mazur, CEO and president of Slangsoft, showed his welcome towards building a closer relationship with RIM. However, former Slangsoft employees had or were considering sue the compan y for amateur salaries, and alleged physical and personal abuse. Creditors also claimed their trouble collecting receivables. It also has problem in term of transferred intellectual property and deal issues with HP (one of RIMs competitors)Three Alternatives There are three main alternatives for RIM at current acquisition of Slangsoft, acquisition of Slangsofts competitors and outsourcing or developing own input and font display technology. Before analyzing the advantages and drawbacks of those three alternatives, we needed to firstly assess RIMs current death penalty and the moving bearing this year, in three years and ten years, and then visualize the business strategy in damage of goals, product market focus, value proposition and core activities, and lastly apply strategic models to position RIMs needs from the deal.Assessment We used the performance matrix (exhibit 5) to classify RIMs current position of the business and the direction it targeted towards. In the current ma rket, RIM had very good organizational wellness and operating performance. Therefore, RIM was in quadrant 1 and the strategy analyse will be a question of fine-tuning and taking a far than usual look into the future. This specialised direction present the importance of RIMs sustainable future operational plan, both in absolutely term and long term. Thus, RIM not only had to enhance its operation in order to check its position within a year, further also needed to develop non-existing market in this rapid-paced industry in a short term (3 years) and capture the future market parcel of land with developed technology in a long term (10 years)Goals as well as the operational direction goals, RIM had its specific business goals. In terms of hard goals, RIM still wanted to enhance their competitiveness as the leader in the market, at the same sequence of developing wealth for stakeholders. In terms of soft goals, RIM was willing to create opportunities for employee to further w hile benefit society through innovation.Product market focus In this case, RIMs board of directors had agreed to penetrate the new Asian market with its BlackBerry solution, which contains the new technology of input and font displays. Therefore, firm chose to have a diversification market focus on both product and market.Value proposition In order to recognize the most market share in Asia and win against other competitors that are interested at the growing Asia market, RIM presented its value proposition in term of execution such as availability and intensity. To be specific, RIM had to find the way to get the font and display technology as soon as possible. With sales hustle and rapid timing, RIM could gain the leadership position in Asian market and capture most of the growing markets to become sustainable.Core activities RIMs determination of its core activities was a critical aspect of its strategy since these choices would have a unfathomed impact on its market and operatio ns control, cost structure, capacities and flexibility. As demonstrated in this case, RIM was reaching out for a vertical integration in order to maintain the control of font and input technology, while limited its competitors abilities of expanding their market share in Asian market. Moreover, there are eight specific tasks RIM set for fiscal 2012. The ones we need to focus on in this specific case are to continue to comfortably increase BlackBerry user base, launch new market and maintain the culture. Since the main strategy RIM utilized was strategic alliance (exhibit 4), it became more obvious that RIM would continue its acquisition on small technologies.acquiring Slangsoft or its competitors or outsourcing/developing own? After assessing RIMs performance and position, it was defined that RIM took great consideration on maintaining its leading position and kept innovating and gaining new market shares. Specifically, by looking carefully at the business strategy components, it was even clearer that RIM is unable to remain for Slangsofts competitors (Zi and Tegic) to get rid of the lawsuits. Also Slangsofts iTID platform had give functionality, performance and architecture compared to all four of competitors.Therefore, Chriss decision on quickly moving on to due diligence and negotiate an agreeable offers is a wise for RIM in the short term. After gaining the market share in the large Asian market, developing own textbook input and font technology might be an optimal solution, hardly it is not short-term solution. Therefore, in order to win Asian market place with a possible past pace and save time for other sustainability plans, RIM should acquire Slangsoft as soon as possible. However, the specific requests and changes can be made through due diligence, as indicated in the plan of action.