Donuts trump Berries as RIM trails Tim Hortons

It’s been a tough year for Research In Motion, once the biggest company in Canada by market capitalization. Lacklustre sales of its Playbook tablet, service outages, product delays and the growth of smartphone rivals all helped drive the company’s stock down from a high of nearly $70 a share in early 2011 to $14 last week. RIM’s value has shrunk so much that it now no longer ranks among the biggest 50 public companies in Canada. It’s now worth even less than retail chains like Tim Hortons and Shoppers Drug Mart. RIM’s market cap is just over $7.5 billion, a whopping $30-billion loss in one year. Tim Hortons and Shoppers are worth $7.8 and $8.8 billion, respectively. RIM insists its new operating system, due later this year, will change its fortunes, but for now, as technology analyst Paul Kedrosky quipped in a recent Twitter post, in the battle of Canadian brands it’s “donuts over doodads.”