RIM Says Sales to U.S. Government Are Rising

Bloomberg BusinessWeek: Enterprise sales of BlackBerry smartphones have plummeted recently, but its RIM says U.S. government sales are on the rise. In the most recent quarter, RIM’s U.S. sales dropped 57 percent; however, RIM’s Scott Totzke said the news isn’t all bad. “Compared to the enterprise over the last year and a half or so, the federal business on whole is up,” he said. “The employee base is shrinking, so if we’re looking at a market with fewer employees and our install base is stable to slightly up, that would seem to indicate that we have an increasing market share.”

In the past 12 months, the Canadian company has sold about 400,000 BlackBerry mobile devices to the U.S. federal government. In addition, about 40 percent of current federal government BlackBerry users upgraded their devices during the same time frame.

RIM can point to one very-high-profile BlackBerry user in the U.S. government: President Obama famously refused to give up his BlackBerry when he took office.