241 Pizza

(RIM's announcement concerning the restatement of up to $250 million worth of earnings because of a review of the company's stock options grants had not been made at the time of interview.)

The company’s share price nearly doubled in the second half of last year.

“This year, more than a billion phones were sold. It’s a big market. The only way for us is up,” says Lazaridis

For the most part, analysts agree with him. “It was crazy that RIM’s shares took a beating when Apple announced the iPhone,” Ben Wood, an analyst at CCS Insight, said. “If anyone should have been affected, it was other manufacturers of consumer-centric devices like Motorola and Samsung - RIM’s staple market is still mobile e-mail for business users.”

Roberta Cozza, a principal analyst at Gartner, said that the main competition for RIM would now come from manufacturers such as Nokia, which is offering push e-mail solution to business users with its new E-series smartphones, rather than Apple.

According to Gartner, Nokia’s share of the PDA market in Europe - 11 per cent - exceeded that of RIM, which had 10 per cent, although RIM still grew its European sales by 10 per cent.

RIM is certainly hoping that its growth will in part be driven by sales of more consumer-friendly products - “Customers would tell me: ‘Your device is great for business, but can you finish the job off so I no longer need my phone?” Lazaridis says - and the inclusion of a camera and MP3 player in the Pearl reflects this.

But it is also keen to take Blackberry beyond the Fortune 1000 to companies that can write customised applications to suit their business needs.

In what is being called the rise of the ‘blue-collar Blackberry’, Argentinian milk farmers are now using BlackBerrys to co-ordinate pick-up and delivery of produce.

Workers at the Hempel Hotel, in London, and the Intercontinental Hotel Group, use programs which help them to check and record the cleanliness of rooms and showers, and police in West Yorkshire now wear vests which have pockets for a radio on one side and a Blackberry on the other. (They use the device to check licence plate numbers and other details directly against databases at their stations.)

Some analysts, such as Daryl Armstrong, at Citigroup, suggest that RIM should remain focused on its core business, and that attempting to attract more consumers would expose it to the strong pricing pressure in the regular handset market, where prices can drop by between 6 and 7 per cent per quarter.

But Lazaridis is adamant that the efficiencies Blackberry can offer in terms of reduced congestion on the network would enable its prices to remain high, and that the move to attract more ‘pro-sumers’, as he called them, was justified.

“Blackberry is transitioning from being a cerebral purchase to one where you walk in the store and go: ‘Wow. What’s that?’ It’s like we’re finally going from being the ugly duckling to swan,” he said.

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