Sunil Dutt
MD- India
Research In Motion
Tell us about RIM's presence in India in the light of customer segments?
At RIM, we constantly work towards offering relevant services and solutions to enrich user experience and to continuously delight our customers. Today, BlackBerry is a brand popular across all categories and segments. Our products and services have an instant connect with the youth and the enterprise segment. RIM continues to be a dominant player in the enterprise market as we offer unmatched solutions with high levels of security, seamless connectivity at affordable cost and with our first mover advantage we will continue to lead this space. We design products with new features, relevant service plans and pricing to suit the Indian market needs.
Our global launch of Curve 9220 smartphone in India, was especially designed and developed for the Indian consumers. We also worked towards ensuring the availability of the latest BlackBerry OS 7 devices as it brings together NexGen technologies such as NFC, Augmented Reality, integrated apps for users.
How do you see the competition and role of channel partners accordingly?
Considering the growth of smartphone market, it is always good to have healthy competition. We believe that it further opens up new opportunities for us to innovate and become more relevant to consumers. As a first step, we strengthened our distribution network to ensure availability and accessibility of BlackBerry products. Today, we are available in 250 cities with 5000 outlets across the country. We have recently partnered with Ingram Micro India to offer BlackBerry mobility solutions to SMBs and large corporate in the country. BlackBerry Experience Zones, which are based on the store-in-store concept is again a unique initiative. Currently we have 500 BEZs and have more than 135 RDS (Retail Distribution Services) across the country. Apart from BEZs, we are also targeting to have 10-15 exclusive BlackBerry Premium Stores by the year end to offer holistic experience on BlackBerry consumer and enterprise services.
How has been the journey of RIM in India?
We entered the market in 2004 and since then we have grown and strengthened our market position significantly in the Indian smartphone space. We have been learning a lot about the market in terms of consumer aspirations and have been improvising on our strategy accordingly. Today we offer BlackBerry phones covering price-range across the spectrum with certain elements of exclusiveness & aspiration and that is going to remain. So you will probably not see a sub Rs. 5000-category device from us. For instance, the BlackBerry Curve series was specially designed keeping in mind the price sensitive market like India and today it is one of the most popular smartphone series, widely used and preferred by the connected youth and other consumers.
