RIM Q2 earnings: Half of its cash is gone, only 200k PlayBooks shipped

Here’s the down side when you own a publicly-traded company — At some point you have to tell everyone what’s been going on. For RIM, that day is today and the results are not pretty. How un-pretty? Here’s a rundown:

• Revenue for the quarter: $4.2 billion
• Net Income: $329 million
• Earnings Per Share (EPS): $.63

For a company in RIM’s shoes, this is far from good. Analysts, according to All Things D, had been forecasting EPS in the neighborhood of $.75 to $1.05, so the $.63 actual number is far below expectations.

And the hits just keep on coming. Shipments of RIM’s PlayBook tablet held at only 200,000 units for the past quarter and shipments of BlackBerry phones were at only 10.6 million. Forecasts for both of these units were considerably higher, with smartphones being predicted at 11-12.5 million units and the PlayBook at 500,000 to 700,000. It’s worth noting here that this is the first time that sales of BlackBerry phones have dropped year over year.

Mind you, these PlayBook figures are still shipment numbers. RIM has not talked about actual sales of the devices, but the company’s cash on hand has dropped by nearly half in the quarter. It is sitting on $1.4 billion, down from $2.9 billion in the previous quarter.

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What’s probably more worrying about the scenario is that RIM is not providing guidance to PlayBook sales for Q3 of this year. That doesn’t bode well when you consider that Apple’s iPad outsold RIM’s entire PlayBook shipment in 2 days.

By other ways of comparison, Apple sold 9.25 million iPads during the previous quarter, a 183% increase in units sold over the quarter 1 year previous. It’s a testament to the care that Apple put into building the device, as compared to the PlayBook which TNW’s Matthew Panzarino summed up as “careless and untested“.

RIM is cautioning analysts on the next quarter, however. The company understands that it is deep in the woods right now, and revenues for Q3 are expected to be at only $5.3 – 5.6 billion. EPS are said to peak at a maximum of $1.40.