RIM looking at accelerated growth in India

How do you look at the Indian market for Blackberry?

The company sees a huge potential in Indian market and obviously is the fastest growing cell phone market in the world. Indian consumers are emerging to understand technology and are well positioned economically to buy Blackberry. From the consumer and business point of view we see a lot of demand and opportunity for blackberry. I am sure Blackberry would play a key role in the future. In India we have barely started and we have long way to go.

Apart from enterprises, is company planning to extend its reach to other segments in India?

We are not here for the masses. We continue to extend our leadership in enterprise space. But we are trying to branch out to consumers segment and to address that space we launched various Blackberry Internet Services (BIS) which are cost effective. Initially when we launched we focused only on big enterprises like government organization and corporate establishments. But from past few years we are moving to address the smaller segments and small business in India. We offer end to end value added wireless platform targeting at enterprise, small business and consumers. We are also trying to promote blackberry to middle managers and other executives, which would help them to leverage their productivity and business process.

What are your strategic plans to expand in Indian Market?Norm Lo, vice president, Asia Pacific, RIM

Our strategy is multi faceted. We work through partnering with carriers, third party Independent software including local Indian software houses. This allows us to grow in enterprises space. We would launch more enhanced products and provide more value added services such as applications like CRM, sales force automation and many others to solve executives’ business problems. This business model has worked with us. We tie up with service providers, retail channels and other mode of indirect channels. In India, we tied up with Airtel two years back. To leverage our services we tied up with Hutch last December. We are open for other similar tie-ups and there are chances of it in future. We are looking at the probabilities to tie-up with Reliance Communication to address the huge subscriber market. Our business model helps service providers to earn higher ARPU and generate higher revenues.

What is the share of Blackberry market? What is its share in India?

I cannot give figures of our market share country wise. Blackberry has got roughly around 70 per cent of market in North America. European countries and Asia pacific contribute 30 per cent of the market. Going forward, we want to increase the APAC market share much more. In India we are roughly growing around double digits of overall market. We want to accelerate growth in India.

What is the target set to achieve in coming years?

We had over eight million subscribers and in the last financial quarter we added one million more subscribers and expecting to grow in the same pace. We are expecting to add another one million subscribers in the next quarter. But we don't have any kind of specific growth forecast figure to put forth right now.

How does Blackberry look at its competitors and how is it different from them?

There has not been a major impact from its competitors as they form a very small part in this business. Blackberry is based on Java platform and open standards. We provide an ecosystem to enterprise side. Enterprise would have invested huge amount on back office and Blackberry would help them to leverage to a mobile wireless kind of a paradigm. They can extend wirelessly their investment in back office through blackberry because we have open standards and can customize data according to their business process. It leverages enterprise productivity; it has also helped to cut cost and has added value.

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