Triangle talent lures BlackBerry maker

The maker of the iconic BlackBerry mobile phone has selected the Triangle as the site of its newest office.

The Canadian company, Research In Motion, will establish a research-and-development facility in the area. RIM's announcement Wednesday ends a month of speculation sparked when the company hosted a two-day job fair here.

According to the company's statement, it picked this area because of its talented workers and has already begun hiring for the new site.

An N.C. Department of Commerce spokeswoman said no state incentives have been discussed to lure the company here.

RIM's expansion is the best news in many months for a talent pool that is overflowing with several thousand jobless engineers, programmers and other high-tech professionals.

The company didn't say how many people it will hire. But Anil Darda, a Wall Street stock analyst who follows RIM for William Blair & Co., said the facility could easily exceed 200 employees, based on the staff sizes at RIM's other regional offices.

Darda said close to half of RIM's employees work in research and development, the fastest-growing segment within the company. The planned elimination of 450 jobs by mobile phone maker Sony Ericsson -- along with layoffs at IBM, Nortel Networks and others -- offered a rare opportunity to snap up qualified job seekers.

"That's where you can pick up this talent in volumes," Darda said. "There's just a few places in this country where you can get this talent."

Based in Ontario, the 25-year-old RIM has U.S. offices in Texas, California, Florida and Illinois.

RIM is expanding to keep up with tremendous growth over the past year. Sales jumped 41 percent, and BlackBerry subscriber accounts surged 70 percent. In the third quarter alone the company shipped more than 10million BlackBerry devices.

"They're always hiring," said Spencer Churchill, an analyst with Paradigm Capital in Toronto. "RIM and others in the smart phone space are moving the exact opposite way" from layoff-prone tech companies.

The company's rapid growth has strained its communications networks, leading to blackouts and crashes every year for the past three years. Last month, BlackBerry users clogged complaint lines after their phones were disabled for several hours at a time.

RIM has created a link -- http://www.rim.com/careers/ -- on its Web site for North Carolina job opportunities. The site lists a wide range of functions within R&D, including testing services, mechanical engineering, product development, accessories integration and industrial design.

The company hasn't named a site yet for the new office.

Churchill said RIM's Triangle office will likely start with fewer than 100 employees. But he noted that smart phones, which account for about 20 percent of the cell phone market, are projected to represent 50 percent of that market within several years.

"These are the companies you want to come in and lay roots," he said.