Rim is teetering at the point where5 the once-dominant mobile phone company would be worth less than the sum of it parts.
Bloomberg reports that Rim hit $18.66 at 1:31 today, below the company's book value of $18.92. According to a Google Finance chart of delayed trades RIMM hit an intra-day low of $18.55 and is currently trading in the $18.80s. The company last traded below book value in 2002, when it was losing money, and peaked peaked at 24.3 times book value in November 2007, according to Bloomberg.
Research in Motion has had a terrible year, to say the least. Last month it had to cope with the media nightmare of a three-day Blackberry outage which drew into question its main remaining positive differentiator: reliability. The company laid off 2,000 employees in July and in the spring dropped to the #3 smartphone platform, behind Apple and Google's Android mobile phone operating system. The Playbook tablet isn't a player. And the company was even blamed for August's London riots.
This particular milestone is a just a moment in time — nothing will happen because of it. Rim stock is still at nearly twice the value it needs to stay listed on some stock markets. President Obama still has to have a Blackberry.
But should investors decide that they are only willing to pay less than asset value that would be another unfortunate indication that the trajectory for this iconic company still hasn't turned around.
