RIM continues to drop in market share

RIM continues to flail while Android and Apple climb ever higher

Poor RIM. It just can’t get a break. While Android and Apple continue to climb, RIM continues to fall, according to May 2011 data released today by comScore.

RIM now claims just 24.7% of the market, a drop of 4.2 percentage point from 28.9% in February, comScore reports. Meanwhile, Android continues to shoot up, climbing 5.1 percentage points to 38.1% of the market from 33% in February. Apple’s growth has been much more modest, now claiming a 26.6% market share from 25.2% in February.

RIM was knocked out of the top spot by Android back in January, marking the start of its demise as the former ruler of the smartphone world—a slow, painful process that was furthered along when Apple climbed ahead of RIM to take the number two spot in April, knocking RIM to third place. As of April, Android claimed 36.4% of the market, Apple took 26%, and RIM had 25.7% of the market, which means it has dropped a full percentage point in one month while Android gained nearly two points.

To be fair, part of both Android’s and Apple’s success comes from the fact that more people are upgrading to smartphones. In May, 76.8 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones, compared to April, when 74.6 million people owned smartphones.

But while rising rates of smartphone ownership may help explain Android’s and Apple’s growth (previous surveys have shown that new smartphone owners tend to buy Android devices), it doesn’t explain RIM’s dramatic fall over the last several months. RIM has been suffering all around, reporting a net income of $695 million in its Q1 2011 earnings report, compared to a net income of $934 million in the previous quarter, and a net income of $769 million in the same quarter last year. The company expects to bring in lower second quarter revenues and plans to initiate mass layoffs in an attempt to trim some of the fat.

Following RIM’s Q1 earnings report in mid-June, the company’s stock has dropped precipitously and closed today at $27.84, down from $38.11 on June 6.