RIM posts rosy outlook for holidays

The company's shares jumped 6 percent to $40.75 in after-hours Nasdaq trading as investors digested the results and forecast.

RIM said it earned $396.3 million, or 69 cents a share, in the three months ended November 29. That was up from a profit of $370.5 million, or 65 cents a share, a year earlier.

Revenue was $2.78 billion, up from $1.67 billion in the same quarter of last year.

Investors were prepared for the third-quarter results, most of which RIM disclosed earlier this month. More important was the outlook for the fourth quarter, which includes the crucial December holiday shopping season.

Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM said it expects fourth-quarter revenue of $3.3 billion to $3.5 billion, and earnings per share of 83 to 91 cents.

That was better than analysts expectations for revenue of $2.97 billion and earnings per share of 83 cents as compiled by Reuters Estimates.

"We have enjoyed our best-ever start to the holiday-buying season over the past few weeks," RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie said in a statement.

Analysts have been concerned big companies could delay BlackBerry upgrades as they clamp down on costs and that retail users could choose less feature-rich phones than the BlackBerry in hopes of saving money.

RIM's rollouts of consumer-aimed devices such as the flip-phone BlackBerry and the touch-screen Storm are part of its aggressive push to diversify its client base beyond the executives, politicians and other professionals who have been its sales mainstay.

(Reporting by Wojtek Dabrowski; editing by Peter Galloway)