RIM Must Pay $147.2 Million Over Patent Infringement

A US judge has ordered RIM to pay the company Mformation $147.2 million. The BlackBerry maker was found guilty of infringing a patent for remote management for smartphones.

According to the judge, RIM is infringing the patent with its BES software for business customers. Specifically, it concerns technology to manage smartphones remotely: Mformation holds a patent on such technology. RIM has been ordered to pay royalties for its use. An amount of $8 per device connected to BES has to be paid, bringing the total amount to $147.2 million.

Because it concerns a US patent, the compensation only relates to American BlackBerrys. Also, the $147.2 million figure does not include future devices connecting to BES. It is not known whether this means that a separate license agreement has to be agreed for this. The BlackBerry maker has already indicated that it will contest the compensation.

The lawsuit comes at a bad time for RIM. The company has been struggling with setbacks for some time, partly due to the declining popularity of its BlackBerry 7 devices and the postponement of the newer BlackBerry 10 software. RIM announced at the presentation of the quarterly figures that it would cut about 5000 jobs. Previously there were 2000 jobs, but the company seems to be forced to put more staff on the street. RIM currently has approximately 16,500 employees.

The quarterly figures also showed that it is still going downhill financially, with RIM losing more than half a billion dollars on sales of 2.8 billion dollars. Turnover was 44 percent lower than in the previous quarter, when the loss was still 125 million dollars. As a result, RIM performed worse in the past quarter than analysts had expected.

RIM recently announced that the first devices with the long-awaited BlackBerry 10 should be released in January 2013. The OS has already been postponed a number of times, which causes frustration among shareholders. A number of them claim to have been misled by RIM and threatened with lawsuits, because CEO Thorsten Heins has recently given too rosy a picture of the company. Heins said, among other things, that there is nothing wrong with the current form of RIM. However, there have been several rumors that the company is looking at different options for the future, including a split. It is therefore possible that RIM will be partially or wholly acquired by another company in the near future, with Microsoft being mentioned several times in the rumor circuit.