This seems like a really short sighted move to me. BlackBerry is apparently not going to come out with new BlackBerry 10 products for the Japanese market:
A spokesman at BlackBerry’s head office in Waterloo, Ontario, said Japanese customers would not be able to buy the new handsets, but insisted the decision did not amount to a snub.
“(It) does not affect our key priorities in the market: to continue to provide BlackBerry service and robust support to BlackBerry’s Japanese customers, both consumers and business users,” the spokesman said. “BlackBerry enjoys a constructive relationship with trusted partner, NTT DoCoMo (Inc.), and we will continue to support the carrier’s ongoing BlackBerry sales in Japan.”
Why have they done this? Here’s one reason:
The Nikkei business daily earlier reported that BlackBerry’s share of the Japanese market had slumped to 0.3 percent from about 5 percent in previous years, without providing a time frame. Domestic shipments of smartphones soared 40 percent year-on-year to an estimated 14 million in the April-September period, but BlackBerry sales are believed to have only come to several tens of thousands, the newspaper said, without naming its sources.
Given its falling market share, the company judged it too costly to develop a Japanese-language version of its new operating system, the report said.
How can you properly promote the BlackBerry in a country where nobody can buy your latest or greatest products? That makes no sense. If I were running BlackBerry, I’d spend whatever was required to make sure I could play in any market that I’m currently in. Clearly Thorsten Heins doesn’t see it that way. So this along with the lack of a BlackBerry 10 phone in the US market in the near term, it really seems that BlackBerry isn’t serious about getting back the market share it lost.
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This entry was posted on February 9, 2013 at 4:18 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags BlackBerry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Are You Japanese And Want A New BlackBerry? You’re Out Of Luck…
This seems like a really short sighted move to me. BlackBerry is apparently not going to come out with new BlackBerry 10 products for the Japanese market:
A spokesman at BlackBerry’s head office in Waterloo, Ontario, said Japanese customers would not be able to buy the new handsets, but insisted the decision did not amount to a snub.
“(It) does not affect our key priorities in the market: to continue to provide BlackBerry service and robust support to BlackBerry’s Japanese customers, both consumers and business users,” the spokesman said. “BlackBerry enjoys a constructive relationship with trusted partner, NTT DoCoMo (Inc.), and we will continue to support the carrier’s ongoing BlackBerry sales in Japan.”
Why have they done this? Here’s one reason:
The Nikkei business daily earlier reported that BlackBerry’s share of the Japanese market had slumped to 0.3 percent from about 5 percent in previous years, without providing a time frame. Domestic shipments of smartphones soared 40 percent year-on-year to an estimated 14 million in the April-September period, but BlackBerry sales are believed to have only come to several tens of thousands, the newspaper said, without naming its sources.
Given its falling market share, the company judged it too costly to develop a Japanese-language version of its new operating system, the report said.
How can you properly promote the BlackBerry in a country where nobody can buy your latest or greatest products? That makes no sense. If I were running BlackBerry, I’d spend whatever was required to make sure I could play in any market that I’m currently in. Clearly Thorsten Heins doesn’t see it that way. So this along with the lack of a BlackBerry 10 phone in the US market in the near term, it really seems that BlackBerry isn’t serious about getting back the market share it lost.
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This entry was posted on February 9, 2013 at 4:18 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags BlackBerry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.