Blackberry Hasn’t Given Up

BlackBerry CEO John Chen has said today that the Asian market is critical to the recovery of his company, but he will not be pushing hard into the Chinese sector just yet.

Chen commented that for BlackBerry, the Chinese market isn’t currently on the top of this to-do list. This is reportedly due to China being very concerned about data security issues making Blackberry do some extra yards to work around this fact. However, Blackberry have confirmed that they will be focusing on markets in India and Southeast Asia – in particular Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.

An ex-coworker told me once that some nightclubs in Singapore require you to own a Blackberry device for you to be allowed into their premises, so you’d think that BlackBerry would have that market on a leash. Now whether this is true or not is another story, but either way it proves that BlackBerry as a company is though of very highly in that region.

In regards to the Chinese issue, Chen told today’s APEC forum:

“If we choose to expand our business in the Chinese market, it takes too long to win a reasonable market share, even if we have this time and money, I might choose our business for a region that has been reflected in the market, such as India and Southeast Asia.”

In 2012, there were reports claiming that the Indian government had allowed Blackberry to view some of its encrypted data, further rendering the Chinese government suspicions of any possible plans of company expansion in their region. Even given this information, Chen commented that this will not stop their research into increasing share in the Chinese market, stating: “Although the data is very sensitive issue, we still have a chance.”

BlackBerry is something that we haven’t really heard much of recently, especially due to the iPhone 6 release and many Samsung heavy-hitting marketing campaigns. Is the ‘business phone’ market something you still find relevant? Let us know your thoughts.

Image courtesy of IT home