BlackBerry Maker to Restate Results; Officer Gives Up a Title
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Research in Motion said that a top executive stepped down from one of his posts after the company said it would restate about $250 million in earnings.
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Research in Motion still doesn&#39;t know why its&#160;BlackBerry service went down for several hours&#160;on Monday.&quot;RIM is continuing to investigate the exact cause&quot; of the outage, the company said in a statement Tuesday. Late Monday, it apologized for any inconvenience caused by the incident, which left customers throughout North America without current e-mail for about three hours starting around 3:30 p.m. Eastern Time.It was the second major outage in less than a year for the popular mobile data service, on which about 12 million subscribers depended at the beginning of last December. The&#160;previous problem, which occurred last April, was caused by a minor software upgrade that went awry, followed by a failed switchover to a backup system, according to RIM. The company said soon afterward that it had identified &quot;certain aspects of its testing, monitoring and recovery processes that will be enhanced&quot; as a result of the failure.BlackBerry e-mail traverses a complex infrastructure involving mobile operator networks, RIM&#39;s network operations center, and BlackBerry Enterprise Servers within companies that use the service. It pushes messages from enterprise e-mail systems, including Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes, out to the popular BlackBerry devices.The system is getting yet more complicated as RIM adds third-party services to appeal to consumers, said Albert Lin, an analyst at investment bank Sooner Cap. As the company tries to keep up with rapid growth in its subscribers -- last year&#39;s fiscal third quarter saw a net gain of 1.65 million -- these types of glitches are to be expected, Lin said.&quot;It&#39;s hard to really expect any major service provider to be 100 percent reliable,&quot; Lin said. Although enterprises now have more push e-mail alternatives than they did when the BlackBerry debuted in 1999, those competitors, such as Visto and Motorola&#39;s Good Technology system, aren&#39;t significantly more dependable, he said.&quot;When it comes to reliable push e-mail ... it&#39;s still hard to find a solution that works better than BlackBerry,&quot; Lin said.
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BEA Systems said Monday that it would restate results to reflect expenses associated with misdated stock option grants.
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Research in Motion Ltd., , maker of the Blackberry email device, said on Monday it would restate its financial statements for fiscal 2004, 2005 and 2006 and the first quarter of 2007, following a review of stock options grants.
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BlackBerry smart phones have lost service across the United States, wireless carriers say.
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BlackBerry email service went down Monday afternoon, according to Research in Motion, maker of the smartphone.
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(InfoWorld) - Research in MotionÂ (RIM) will search for a new chairman of its board after CEO Jim Balsillie stepped down from the job Monday, taking blame for his role in a stock-option scam that will cost the company $250 million in restated earnings. RIM, which makes the BlackBerry smartphone, will restate its annual earnings statements for fiscal years 2004, 2005, and 2006, and its statement for the first quarter of 2007. The changes could also affect its second and third quarter statements for 2007, which areÂ not yet filed, since RIM's internal audit is not complete. Balsillie will keep his other titles as co-CEO and a member of the board, but he and other top managers will be forced to pay back the profits they made by hand picking the most profitable dates for buying their stock options instead of receiving them the same date they were awarded, the company said. Employees can inflate their profits by claiming they received stock options on a day when the market was low, then selling them when the market rises again. Many technology companies have restated earnings caused by that practice in recent months, includingÂ Apple,Â Broadcom,Â McAfee, andÂ Monster Worldwide, as well asÂ Pixar, the computer animation film studio. Hoping to avoid lawsuits and regulatory censure, RIM began an internal investigation of stock option granting and accounting in August 2006, and predicted one month later that the damage would be between $25 million and $45 million. The company now says the true amount will be nearly 10 times that estimate. RIM also says it is cooperating with accounting investigations by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Ontario Securities Commission and a shareholder lawsuit filed in Canada's Ontario Superior Court of Justice. RIM's investigation covered more than 3,200 grant packages made between December 1996 and August 2006. So far, the review committee has found incorrect accounting for all options granted before Feb. 27, 2002, and in 63 percent of the grants made since then. The recent batch includes 321 grants for a total of 4.6 million shares. Balsillie resigned as chairman because the review showed that he had personally made or approved all grants made since RIM went public in 1997, except for those to himself and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis. RIM Chief Financial Officer Dennis Kavelman also helped to administer the awards. Balsillie told an internal review committee that he used the grants to attract skilled employees to the company in a competitive industry, and he made them so informally because of the RIM's rapid growth at that time, according to a company statement released Monday about the review. Balsillie and Kavelman also told the committee "they had a general understanding" that options could be granted at any chosen date within the fiscal reporting period. "Their understanding was incorrect," the committee said in its report. "The Special Committee determined that the company failed to maintain adequate internal and accounting controls with respect to the issuance of options in compliance with the company's stock option plan ... the grant process was characterized by informality and a lack of definitive documentation, and lacked safeguards to ensure compliance with applicable accounting, regulatory and disclosure rules." In other fallout from the investigation, Kavelman will step down as CFO, taking a new job as chief operating officer for administration and operations. Balsillie and Lazaridis will pay the company $5 million each to defray the cost of the investigation, and RIM accepted the resignations of Kendall Cork and Doug Wright, two members of the board's compensation committee. Finally, RIM promised to establish an oversight committee, charged with examining executive compensation, insider trading and hiring practices. Â
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By Kathryn Balint, The San Diego Union-Tribune  Sep. 15--Applied Micro Circuits said yesterday it will restate earnings  as far back as 1998 after an internal review concluded that different  measurement dates should have been used to compute some of the company's stock  option grants.
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A U.S. appeals court ruled Tuesday that Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry e-mail device, infringed on another company's patent  --  but sent the case back to a lower court for some of the claims to be reconsidered.
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Finding itself amid a wave of technology companies under investigation in both the US and Canada for granting backdated options without reporting their values as charges, RIM announced this morning it may have to restate prior years' earnings up to 2003 to the tune of USD$220 million, with additional restatement of perhaps $5 million per year thereafter.
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E-mail service of Research In Motion's BlackBerry smartphones experienced a "critical severity outage" on Monday, the company told clients in an e-mail.
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NEW YORK -- BlackBerry smart phones have lost service across the United States, wireless carriers said Monday.
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Research In Motion Ltd.    expects to be up to date with its regulatory filings  shortly, but the BlackBerry maker needs more time as its  accountants continue to grapple with a $250-million earnings  restatement related to mistakes it made in granting stock  options in the past.
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Rumors that Microsoft Corp. may purchase BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd. are likely just that because ...
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BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd. said Monday it will restate its financial statements as far back as fiscal 2004 because of past stock option reporting errors and it anticipates a $250 million reduction in previous earnings. Chairman and co-CEO Jim Balsillie is stepping aside as chairman.
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Research In Motion Ltd.   expects to be up to date with its regulatory filings shortly, but the BlackBerry maker needs more time as its accountants continue to grapple with a $250-million earnings restatement related to mistakes it made in granting stock options in the past.
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Stock options again The Verisign board has decided to restate more than four years worth of financial reports after an internal review found stock options may have made them unreliable.â¦