TORONTO - BlackBerry maker Research in Motion's (TSX:RIM) co-CEOs, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, are stepping down.
The company says the pair who founded RIM will be replaced by Thorsten Heins, a chief operating officer who joined RIM four years ago from Siemens AG.
Balsillie and Lazaridis have headed Waterloo, Ont.-based RIM together for the past two decades.
The company took a big slide in 2011, dropping behind its peers in the lightning-paced smartphone market, suffering through the worst service outage in its history and losing tens of billions of dollars in market value.
And the PlayBook tablet, RIM's answer to the Apple iPad, failed to gain consumer support and the company was forced to give it deep discounts to help move the devices off store shelves.
Many investors held Balsillie and Lazaridis responsible for the company's problems and previously called for them to be replaced and also for the company to be sold or broken up.
