RIM may be undergoing difficulties at the moment, but their Blackberry smartphones are far from quitting the Malaysian market. Local telco players have even reported over 200-percent year-on-year growth for the Waterloo-based smartphone vendor, and RIM Malaysia enjoys 70-percent quarter-on-quarter growth, thanks to a newly-expanded local team that has been managing relationships with partners and carriers.
According to Nicholas Horton, managing director for RIM, Indochina, market demand is still strong, and fundamentally still growing. “Blackberry fits very well into the social fabric of Malaysia and from that perspective, it is doing well.”
He was referring to the regular on-the-ground activities that they hold in Malaysia, the most recent of which was “Stop Missing Out”, a cheeky campaign that literally urged Malaysians to get in on the Blackberry experience.
Malaysia’s RIM director, Annamalai Muthu chipped in with, “We have strategically-placed products so that everyone can afford a Blackberry, even taxi drivers.” This is a far cry from maybe 8 years ago, before the Canadian mobile maker shifted their approach towards mass markets around the world and when the Blackberry device could only be found mostly in corporate offices and board rooms.
That doesn’t mean RIM’s focus on the enterprise has wavered. They have announced renewed focus in that segment since last February and even launched solutions to address the enterprise and the fast-changing workplace.
For example, besides working with local system integrator Compurex to deploy a Blackberry Smart Tag solution for the Federal Agriculture Marketing Authority (FAMA), RIM has also introduced Fusion, a mobile device management that extends to other platforms as well. It leverages the huge install-base of BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) in Malaysian companies and is a single, unified, Web-based console for easily managing personal devices that come onto the corporate network.
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RIM produces a mobile device management solution for the BYOD-driven organisation |
BlackBerry 10 or BBX
The belief is that people would still want Blackberry devices even though RIM’s anticipated operating system, has been delayed till next year.
Muthu said, “Malaysia’s growth of smartphones is about 50-percent. Blackberry is produced for different tiers of the market… feature phones are slowly going away.”
What’s the hold up? Horton explained, “We need this to be super successful, so we are putting off the launch.”
A few of the features that RIM wants to tweak to perfection, would put them squarely against main tablets and smartphone rivals Apple and Android. The core difference about BB10 is multi-tasking, messaging and the virtual keypad. Horton talks about taking the thumb-typing experience QWERTY keypad-based Blackberry’s are known for, to touch screens. Multi-tasking with BB 10 apparently would also be easier to do. “We want to get these features absolutely right.”
Muthu also shared that the new operating system is expected to help RIM in Malaysia achieve up to double growth. “Because there is a segment that RIM isn’t playing in right now.”
