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BY DANNY MATTESON/ JJ BAILEY

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Research in Motion might be headed in the wrong direction -- suffering a downgrade on the company’s stock Monday. Bloomberg has more.

“Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu … downgraded RIM's stock to ‘Neutral’ from ‘Buy’ ... He said the company is facing pressure on its profit margins due to ‘highly competitive’ pricing from rivals such as HTC, Amazon.com Inc., Samsung and Apple Inc.”

The news won’t shock many market watchers. Canadian company RIM’s past six months have been a struggle. With outages and shrinking sales, there hasn’t been much sunshine north of the border. CNET takes a hard look at RIM’s status, and doesn’t pull any punches.

“RIM's stock has already cratered this year, falling 70 percent amid fears that the BlackBerry can no longer compete against the likes of Apple's iPhone and Google's Android phones. In addition, its first stab at the tablet market, the PlayBook, was an unmitigated disaster.”

Many outlets are quoting Wu as saying his firm should have downgraded the ailing company a month ago when they were trading at $24 a share. Now, the company is trading around $16 a share. But All Things Digital says, you wanna knock RIM’s stock stability? Get in line.

“Wu is latest in a conga-line of analysts cutting their targets and/or ratings on the BlackBerry maker’s stock. RBC Capital Markets, Barclays Capital, Sanford C. Bernstein, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase — all have slapped downgrades on the beleaguered RIM in the past six months.”

So why only down to neutral? Sounds like things are pretty bad. But Wu isn’t saying sell just yet. Digital Trends tells us why.

“However, Wu did note that RIM has ‘intrinsic value,’ including a large patent portfolio and 70 million subscribers, and declined to downgrade the stock to ‘underperform.’”

That patent portfolio includes cell phone, tablet and push technology. Wu says that, combined with the Blackberry OS, a strong push network and other software could be valued between 2.5 and 4 billion dollars, making RIM a prime target for acquisition.