RIM Announces Stronger Subscriber Growth in Spite of Recent Outages

Yesterday RIM announced that it had stronger than expected subscriber growth for its current fiscal accounting quarter, which ends on the first of March. RIM raised its expected current-quarter subscriber growth figures from 1.8 million to somewhere around 2.1 million new users. In spite of the raised subscriber numbers, though, RIM did not announce increased revenue projections.

The increase in RIM's subscriber base comes in spite of a series large scale service outages. RIM experienced a mass outage last week as a result of a system upgrade, and experienced a smaller scale outage earlier this week that RIM attributed to some system maintenance that took longer than expected to complete. The recent outage occurred in the wee hours of the night and was resolved before most subscribers even noticed it had occurred. In April of last year RIM's network experienced another large scale outage.

Many businesses and government agencies rely on RIM's highly centralized network for communications, and the company's track record of outages has been a great cause for concern among its users, and a reason for hope among its competitors. In spite of its service problems, RIM managed to control about 41% of the U.S. smartphone market, and 11% of the worldwide smartphone market.