Despite being in the midst of one of the worst economic recessions in recent times, RIM, the maker of the ubiquitous BlackBerry smartphone, is bucking the trend by aiming to fill 1,250 new positions. The locations of these positions are spread around the world, though the majority are at the R&D and product development departments, at the company's headquarters at Waterloo, Ontario.

The growth spurt here could probably be attributed to the four new BlackBerry devices that were launched since August--the BlackBerry Bold and BlackBerry Storm among them. This represents an unprecedented number for the enterprise-centric company, which used to release just one or two new series of smartphones per year.

As reported by the Financial Post, the comments of an unidentified company insider appear to support this view. "For the past three or four years, RIM has done the same thing companies like Nokia [Corp.] are doing now with a fraction of the workforce. Right now, for every engineer who is promoted, RIM is hiring two or three to replace them. Probably in a few more years RIM could do some restructuring but not now."

I think that Genuity Capital Markets analyst Deepak Chopra rounds it up well enough, "The company still views itself as a growth company; clearly the downturn provides an opportunity for them to gain more market share."

For more information about the story:
- check out the article at the Financial Post

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