Lack of low-end BlackBerry 10 phone could be a serious stumbling block in RIM comeback bid

South Africa is one of Research In Motion’s (RIMM) top five markets in the world, and it is a decent proxy for the entire African market. Leading regional carrier Vodacom’s November smartphone statistics illustrate exactly why BlackBerry 10 cannot arrive soon enough… and why RIM badly needs a cheap new BlackBerry 10 model by spring.
[More from BGR: Apple CEO Tim Cook sees pay drop 99% in 2012]
Vodacom holds more than 50% of the South African handset market and South Africa is the largest mobile phone market in the continent.
[More from BGR: Microsoft Surface trampled at the bottom of the tablet pile this Christmas]
On November 12th, Vodacom announced that it had 2.7 million BlackBerry users on its South African network, a number that increased by 300,000 in three months. The number of Android users grew by 200,000 to 700,000 subscribers. The number of iPhone users grew by 250,000 to 500,000.
Of course, there are many ways at looking at these trends but it’s striking that the growth of the BlackBerry user base has slowed down to 12% in a quarter while Android growth is now at 40% and iPhone growth is 100%. Even though the pool of BlackBerry users is still expanding in the most important African market, we are now close to the tip-off point where the absolute number of both Android and iPhone users added each quarter is going to be larger than the number of new BlackBerry subs.
RIM announced last week that its global customer base has finally started shrinking — the BlackBerry subscriber pool dropped from 80 million to 79 million between the August and November quarters.
During the August quarter, RIM still managed to add 2 million BlackBerry subscribers. The non-U.S. BlackBerry subscriber base is still growing, but too slowly to offset the U.S. erosion. This is the trend that the Vodacom November numbers also reflect. In Africa and Asia, that BlackBerry growth slowdown is unlikely to reverse until RIM launches a cheap, sub-$250 model with the new BlackBerry 10 OS.
In South Africa, affluent buyers are now flocking under the iPhone banner, while Samsung (005930) and Chinese vendors are mopping up middle class consumers with cheap Android models. New high-end phones in the $600 range are not going to change this equation.
RIM must strike hard in the low-end market to regain its African momentum. By Easter, Android and iPhone camps will have pulled ahead of RIM in new subscriber additions at Vodacom. Next spring, South Africa could well be the most important global bellwether of RIM’s struggle to recapture subscriber growth.

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China commentaries demand U.S. responsibility on "fiscal cliff"

 China's official Xinhua news agency demanded on Tuesday that the United States live up to its global economic responsibilities, put political infighting aside and sort out the "fiscal cliff" mess.
"Being the world's only superpower and the issuer of the dominant global reserve currency, the United States has a unique role and an unshirkable duty to help cure the ailing global economy," one of its English-language commentaries said.
"In today's economically interconnected and interdependent world, it is more of a benefit than of a burden that Washington honors its global responsibility," the state-run agency added.
"Should Washington fail to pull itself from the escarpment, the repercussions would throw the whole world into a cold winter of stagnant growth and laggard recovery."
A second commentary said the fiscal cliff debacle was a clear example of how poorly the U.S. political system worked.
"These days, both Democrats and Republicans seem more intent on inflicting damage on their political adversaries than working out a better future for their country," it said.
"Americans may be proud of their mature democracy, but the political gridlock in Washington really looks ugly from an outsider's view."
While such commentaries are not policy statements as such, they can be read as a reflection of government thinking.
The United States was on track to tumble over the fiscal cliff at midnight on Monday, at least for a day, as lawmakers held back from supporting an eleventh-hour plan from Senate leaders to avert severe tax increases and spending cuts.
China sits on the world's biggest pile of foreign exchange reserves worth $3.3 trillion and as much as 70 percent of the holdings are still invested in U.S. dollar assets, including U.S. Treasuries, according to analysts.
China is on course to end 2012 with the slowest full year of growth since 1999 and while the 7.7 percent rate forecast in a benchmark Reuters poll is way above the world's other major economies, it is far below the roughly 10 percent annual growth seen for most of the last 30 years.

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Analysis: Economy would dodge bullet for now under fiscal deal

 A deal worked out by Senate leaders to avoid the "fiscal cliff" was far from any "grand bargain" of deficit reduction measures.
But if approved by the House of Representatives, it could help the country steer clear of recession, although enough austerity would remain in place to likely keep the economy growing at a lackluster pace.
The Senate approved a last-minute deal early Tuesday morning to scale back $600 billion in scheduled tax hikes and government spending cuts that economists widely agree would tip the economy into recession.
The deal would hike taxes permanently for household incomes over $450,000 a year, but keep existing lower rates in force for everyone else.
It would make permanent the alternative minimum tax "patch" that was set to expire, protecting middle-income Americans from being taxed as if they were rich.
Scheduled cuts in defense and non-defense spending were simply postponed for two months.
Economists said that if the emerging package were to become law, it would represent at least a temporary reprieve for the economy. "This keeps us out of recession for now," said Menzie Chinn, an economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The contours of the deal suggest that roughly one-third of the scheduled fiscal tightening could still take place, said Brett Ryan, an economist at Deutsche Bank in New York.
That is in line with what many financial firms on Wall Street and around the world have been expecting, suggesting forecasts for economic growth of around 1.9 percent for 2013 would likely hold.
At midnight Monday, low tax rates enacted under then-President George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003 expired. If the House agrees with the Senate - and there remained considerable doubt on that score - the new rates would be extended retroactively.
Otherwise, together with other planned tax hikes, the average household would pay an estimated $3,500 more in taxes, according to the Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank. Budget experts expect the economy would take a hit as families cut back on spending.
Provisions in the Senate bill would avoid scheduled cuts to jobless benefits and to payments to doctors under a federal health insurance program.
AUSTERITY'S BITE
Like the consensus of economists from Wall Street and beyond, Deutsche Bank has been forecasting enough fiscal drag to hold back growth to roughly 1.9 percent in 2013. Ryan said the details of the deal appeared to support that forecast.
That would be much better than the 0.5 percent contraction predicted by the Congressional Budget Office if the entirety of the fiscal cliff took hold, but it would fall short of what is needed to quickly heal the labor market, which is still smarting from the 2007-09 recession.
"We continue to anticipate a significant economic slowdown at the start of the year in response to fiscal drag and a contentious fiscal debate," economists at Nomura said in a research note.
In particular, analysts say financial markets are likely to remain on tenterhooks until Congress raises the nation's $16.4 trillion debt ceiling, which the U.S. Treasury confirmed had been reached on Monday.
While the Bush tax cuts would be made permanent for many Americans under the budget deal, a two-year-long payroll tax holiday enacted to give the economy an extra boost would expire. The Tax Policy Center estimates this could push the average household tax bill up by about $700 next year.
The suspension of spending cuts sets up a smaller fiscal cliff later in the year which still could be enough to send the economy into recession, said Chinn.
He warned that ongoing worries about the possibility of recession could keep businesses from investing, which would hinder economic growth.
"You retain the uncertainty," Chinn said.

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Senate approves "fiscal cliff" deal, crisis eased

 The Senate moved the U.S. economy back from the edge of a "fiscal cliff" on Tuesday, voting to avoid imminent tax hikes and spending cuts in a bipartisan deal that could still face stiff challenges in the House of Representatives.
In a rare New Year's session at around 2 a.m. EST (0700 GMT), senators voted 89-8 to raise some taxes on the wealthy while making permanent low tax rates on the middle class that have been in place for a decade.
But the measure did little to rein in huge annual budget deficits that have helped push the U.S. debt to $16.4 trillion.
The agreement came too late for Congress to meet its own deadline of New Year's Eve for passing laws to halt $600 billion in tax hikes and spending cuts which strictly speaking came into force on Tuesday.
But with the New Year's Day holiday, there was no real world impact and Congress still had time to draw up legislation, approve it and backdate it to avoid the harsh fiscal measures.
That will need the backing of the House where many of the Republicans who control the chamber complain that President Barack Obama has shown little interest in cutting government spending and is too concerned with raising taxes.
All eyes are now on the House which is to hold a session on Tuesday starting at noon (1700 GMT).
Obama called for the House to act quickly and follow the Senate's lead.
"While neither Democrats nor Republicans got everything they wanted, this agreement is the right thing to do for our country and the House should pass it without delay," he said in a statement.
"There's more work to do to reduce our deficits, and I'm willing to do it. But tonight's agreement ensures that, going forward, we will continue to reduce the deficit through a combination of new spending cuts and new revenues from the wealthiest Americans," Obama said.
Members were thankful that financial markets were closed, giving them a second chance to return to try to head off the fiscal cliff.
But if lawmakers cannot pass legislation in the coming days, markets are likely to turn sour. The U.S. economy, still recovering from the 2008/2009 downturn, could stall again if Congress fails to fix the budget mess.
"If we do nothing, the threat of a recession is very real. Passing this agreement does not mean negotiations halt, far from it. We can all agree there is more work to be done," Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, told the Senate floor.
A new, informal deadline for Congress to legislate is now Wednesday when the current body expires and it is replaced by a new Congress chosen at last November's election.
The Senate bill, worked out after long negotiations on New Year's Eve between Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, also postpones for two months a $109 billion "sequester" of sweeping spending cuts on military and domestic programs.
It extends unemployment insurance to 2 million people for a year and makes permanent the alternative minimum tax "patch" that was set to expire, protecting middle-income Americans from being taxed as if they were rich.
'IMPERFECT SOLUTION'
The tax hikes do not sit easy with Republicans but conservative senators held their noses and voted to raise rates for the rich because not to do so would have meant increases for almost all working Americans.
"It took an imperfect solution to prevent our constituents from a very real financial pain, but in my view, it was worth the effort," McConnell said.
House Speaker John Boehner - the top Republican in Congress - said the House would consider the Senate deal. But he left open the possibility of the House amending the Senate bill, which would spark another round of legislating.
"The House will honor its commitment to consider the Senate agreement if it is passed. Decisions about whether the House will seek to accept or promptly amend the measure will not be made until House members ... have been able to review the legislation," Boehner and other House Republican leaders said in a statement.
Boehner has struggled for two years to get control over a group of several dozen Tea Party fiscal conservatives in his caucus who strongly oppose tax increases and demand that he force Obama to make savings in the Medicare and Social Security healthcare and retirement programs.
A campaign-style event held by Obama in the White House as negotiations with Senate leaders were taking place on Monday may have made it more difficult for Republicans to back the deal. In remarks to a group of supporters that resembled a victory lap, the president noted that his rivals were coming around to his way of seeing things.
"Keep in mind that just last month Republicans in Congress said they would never agree to raise tax rates on the wealthiest Americans. Obviously, the agreement that's currently being discussed would raise those rates and raise them permanently," he said to applause before the Senate deal was sealed.
Obama's words and tone annoyed Republican lawmakers who seemed to feel that the Democrat was gloating.
"That's not the way presidents should lead," said Republican Senator John McCain, Obama's rival in the 2008 election.
A deal with the House on Tuesday, while uncertain, would not mark the end of congressional budget fights. The "sequester" spending cuts will come up again in February as will the contentious "debt ceiling," which caps how much debt the federal government can hold.
Republicans may see those two issues as their best chance to try to rein in government spending and clip Obama's wings at the start of his second term.

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Political brinksmanship still threatens US economy

Even if U.S. lawmakers prevent the worst of the so-called fiscal cliff, the brinksmanship in Washington over taxes and spending is likely to continue damaging the fragile economy well into 2013.
A months-long political standoff over fiscal policy has already taken its toll, adding uncertainty that has discouraged consumers from spending and businesses from hiring and investing.
The squabbling seems sure to persist even if the House of Representatives goes along with a partial fix passed by the Senate in the early hours of Jan. 1. Under that plan, taxes will rise on individual incomes over $400,000 and household incomes over $450,000 and on the portion of estates that exceeds $5 million. The House is expected to vote Tuesday or Wednesday.
But lawmakers appear to have postponed tough decisions on government spending, giving themselves a reprieve from cuts that were scheduled to begin taking effect automatically Jan. 1. That just sets the stage for more hard-bargaining later.
And another standoff is likely to arrive as early as February when Congress will need to raise the $16.4 trillion federal borrowing limit so the government can keep paying its bills. House Republicans probably won't agree to raise the debt limit without offsetting spending cuts that Democrats are sure to resist.
"Even if they cut some small deal, the process and what is left undone still means there's a lot of uncertainty," says Stuart Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial Services Group.
After Jan. 1, asks Ethan Harris, co-head of global economics at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, "what induces the two sides to stop fighting and start compromising? ... We're kind of in the first act of a three-act play," Harris says. "One of the key messages from the cliff is that this stuff just doesn't get resolved quickly."
The fiscal cliff itself was created to force Democrats and Republicans to compromise.
To end a 2011 standoff over raising the federal debt limit, they agreed to a Jan. 1, 2013 deadline to reach a deal over taxes and spending. If they didn't, more than $500 billion in 2013 tax increases would begin to take effect, along with $109 billion in cuts from the military and domestic spending programs. The sharp tax hikes and spending cut would threaten to send the economy over the cliff and back into recession.
But negotiations to avert catastrophe have highlighted once again how far apart the two parties are on taxes (Republicans don't want to raise them) and spending (Democrats are reluctant to cut government programs).
"We're learning about how deep the impasse is," Harris says. "Both sides have decided that they were willing to go to the last minute."
Political gridlock has been rattling financial markets and shaking consumer and business confidence the past two years.
After a fight over raising the debt limit last year, the credit rating agency Standard & Poor's yanked the U.S. government's blue-chip AAA bond rating because it feared that America's dysfunctional political system couldn't deliver a credible plan to reduce the federal government's debt. S&P cited an overabundance of "political brinksmanship" and warned that "the differences between political parties have proven to be extraordinarily difficult to bridge."
The Dow Jones industrials dropped 635 points in panicked selling the first day of trading after the S&P announcement.
Harris contrasted the latest budget brawls with previous budget agreements in the 1980s and 1990s. Those deals generally included deficit cuts that were spread out over time and were sometimes bipartisan.
That's better for business and consumer confidence than the repeated partisan standoffs and threats of sudden tax hikes and spending cuts that Congress now engages in.
"The process matters almost as much as what they actually do," Harris says.
Outside Washington, the economy has been getting some good news. Europe's financial crisis appears to have eased, reducing the threat of a renewed financial crisis. And the U.S. real estate market finally appears to be recovering from the housing bust.
But the old worries have been replaced by new ones about political gridlock, says Joseph LaVorgna, an economist at Deutsche Bank.
The partisan divide has left businesses and consumers wondering what's going to happen to their taxes and to federal contracts.
Companies have plenty of cash. But they reduced spending on industrial equipment, computers and software from July to September, the first quarterly drop since mid-2009 when the economy was still in recession. And hiring has been stuck at a modest level of about 150,000 new jobs per month this year.
"What we see is fear," says Darin Harris, chief operating for Primrose Schools, an Atlanta company with 250 franchised preschools in 17 states. He says franchise owners have been reluctant to invest in a second or third school until they know what tax rates are going to be and where government spending is headed. "All those things make our small business owners reluctant to reinvest."
Consumer confidence fell in December for the second straight month, according to a survey by the Conference Board, which blamed the drop on worries about the fiscal cliff. The uncertainty is also believed to have dinged holiday shopping, which grew at the slowest pace this year since 2008.
"Every kind of brinksmanship moment is a reminder to people to not trust the economy," Harris says.

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US may skirt 'fiscal cliff' but faces higher taxes

A last-ditch tax deal in the Senate might let the U.S. economy escape the worst of the so-called fiscal cliff and avoid going back into recession. But even if the House goes along, the tax increases likely coming in 2013 will dent economic growth anyway.
In the early hours of the new year, the Senate voted to end a long stalemate and raise taxes on upper-income households, extend long-term unemployment benefits and postpone decisions over government spending cuts, officials said. But any deal needs approval from the House.
About $536 billion in 2013 tax increases were scheduled to take effect Jan. 1, along with $109 billion in cuts from military and domestic-spending programs, if Democrats and Republicans could not reach agreement.
Mark Vitner, senior economist at Wells Fargo, said he expects budget policy, including the higher taxes in the Senate plan, to shave 0.8 percentage points off economic growth in 2013. The economy doesn't have much growth to give. Vitner predicts it will grow just 1.5 percent in 2013, down from 2.2 percent in 2012.
The biggest hit to the economy is expected to come from the end of a two-year Social Security tax cut. The so-called payroll tax is scheduled to bounce back up to 6.2 percent from 4.2 percent in 2011 and 2012, amounting to a $1,000 tax increase for someone earning $50,000 a year.
"Even with this deal, fiscal policy will still be a net drag on economic growth," Vitner said. "The expiration of the payroll tax holiday will reduce after-tax income for all workers and hit lower to middle income families the hardest."
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, calculates that the higher payroll tax will reduce economic growth by 0.6 percentage points in 2013. The other possible tax increases — including higher taxes on household incomes above $450,000 a year — will slice just 0.15 percentage points off annual growth, Zandi says.

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Twitter and Nielsen pair up to publish new "social TV" ratings

- Nielsen Holdings NV, the television viewership measurement company, said on Monday it will partner with Twitter to publish a new set of ratings that measure chatter on Twitter about TV programming.
The new measurement, dubbed the "Nielsen Twitter TV Rating," seeks to tap into the stream of viewer commentary and armchair musings generated on "second screens" - the smartphones and tablets perched on Twitter users' laps while they watch, say, Monday Night Football or the latest episode of "Homeland" on their TVs.
The new ratings, to be launched next fall, arrive at a moment when media and advertising industry executives say they are observing a shift in TV viewing habits that include the rise of "second screen" use.
But significant questions remain for advertisers over how best to interpret the data and whether a Twitter ratings system is meaningful at all.
In September, Nielsen ratings showed that TV viewership for Viacom Inc's MTV Video Music Awards, which coincided with the Democratic National Convention, plummeted by more than 50 percent from a year ago. Yet social media chatter tripled, according to the research firm Trendrr.
Brad Adgate, an analyst at Horizon Media, said advertisers will view the Twitter ratings as a useful layer of information about a show's popularity, but it is "not going to be close to the currency" of existing ratings metrics.
"It lets producers and creative directors know if the storyline is working, like a huge focus group," Adgate said. "But I don't think you can translate comments to ratings for a show. Right now I think the bark right now is bigger than its bite."
The new ratings will measure the number of people discussing a show on Twitter, as well as those who are exposed to the chatter, to provide the "precise size of the audience and effect of social TV to TV programming," Nielsen said.
"As the experience of TV viewing continues to evolve, our TV partners have consistently asked for one common benchmark from which to measure the engagement of their programming," Chloe Sladden, Twitter's vice president of media, said in a post on the company blog on Monday. "This new metric is intended to answer that request, and to act as a complement and companion to the Nielsen TV rating."
Mark Burnett, executive producer of NBC's hit "The Voice," argued that advertisers should value programs that can attract a high level of social media engagement from viewers. Deeply embedded social media elements, such as live Twitter polls, were critical in driving "The Voice" to the top of the Tuesday night ratings among viewers between 18 to 49, Burnett said.
"If you're an advertiser, wouldn't you want to know whether people are watching this show passively or if they're actively engaged in the viewing experience?" Burnett said. "Five years from now this will make traditional television ratings seem archaic."
For Twitter, the partnership with a recognized measurement company like Nielsen emphatically punctuates a year-long effort by its media division to bring second-screen usage into the mainstream.
Twitter's convergence with television has been on display during sporting and major news events, which have provided some of the biggest viewership moments for both broadcasters and the social media company.
During the Summer Olympics in London, Twitter set up a page for the event that displayed photos from inside an event venue or athletes' tweets to complement what was being broadcast on NBC. Advertisers like Procter & Gamble Co, for instance, which advertised heavily during the Games, tried to bridge the two mediums by airing an ad on TV, then sending out a tweet soliciting viewer feedback about the ad.
As news organizations tallied votes on election night in the United States on November 6, worldwide Twitter chatter hit a peak of more than 327,000 per minute, the company said this month.

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