After announcing the first national telecom policy (NTP) in 1994, India has witnessed stupendous growth in wireless services.
TelecomLead.com, a prominent B2B news website on telecom industry, is joining the celebration of 20 years of the first NTP by inviting select telecom CEOs including BlackBerry India MD Sunil Lalvani to write about the growth of telecom in India and what future holds for their company.
Over the past decade, the India business strategy has epitomized the core strategy of leading technology companies that are trying to increase their foothold in emerging markets. Given the size of the market, the risks are smaller as compared to the potential upside. However, given certain complexities associated with conducting business in India, the successful ones are those that balance out field marketing aggression with speed, agility and adaptation to Indian market needs. One such primary example is BlackBerry. It’s a company that has learnt from the past, and is now poised to take a quantum leap forward in 2014.
For the non-believers, here’s why.
3 years ago BlackBerry could do no wrong. Or at least one would have liked to believe this statement back then. It was one of the world’s fastest growing companies in 2009; its global subscriber base had grown 5 times in just over 3 years, and BBM was the buzzword for every youth, especially in India. It was in every sense, an aspirational brand.
That said, as the competitive environment became fierce and customers had a wider range of choices, the market became tough. Even so, BlackBerry has always been about secure, reliable communication for corporates, immediacy and privacy of BBM for consumers, and a QWERTY keyboard experience that has no parallel, even unto this day. BlackBerry’s intent to update its OS was the right one, and the finished product, BB10, was simply amazing. Going forward, I believe that articulating BlackBerry 10, balancing the consumer and enterprise plays and giving the right direction to commercializing these will be critical for our success.
With a new CEO and core leadership team, the priorities for growth have been well articulated in the recent ‘Open Letter’” to customers as well as during our latest quarter earnings call. These priorities align well with the trends in the mobility market in India in 2014, and are articulated below:
- Services will differentiate: With the market cluttered by smart devices of varying form factor, and the pace of hardware innovation slowing down, OEM’s that evolve to a combination of services as well as products are likely to be more successful in 2014. Here’s where BlackBerry Z30 stands out as a product with a very good hardware, backed up by an incredible OS. With the new BB 10.2.1 operating system due to release in the New Year supported on all BB-10 devices, its service features will differentiate it from competition. The ability to seamlessly integrate social media applications, support for Android apps, prioritize messages by content and contacts, and wirelessly stream multi-media files to smart TVs, make the BB-10 offering ideal for power users.
- Security and Management of Mobile end points will be key revenue drivers for Blackberry in 2014 and beyond. The Snowden revelations and NSA leaks have further fuelled the need for security and privacy to be non-negotiable in the Enterprise environment. BlackBerry’s MDM offering, BES-10 for on premise device management or even Cloud based management solutions will ensure that Corporates embrace BYOD, without the fear of security or management of Corporate data. This will drive software and services revenue for BlackBerry and its core partners, the Carriers. Now, every Android and iOS user in the Enterprise is also a potential Software & Services customer for BlackBerry.
- BBM, Channels, Apps eco-system: It is a known fact that the youth of today can be fickle and impatient with their technology adoption, and yet form an integral part of the success or failure of a brand or product. Rather than trying to regain the “cool” tagline through hardware, BlackBerry’s best bet to win back the youth would be through BBM Channels, a powerful Social Media offering that incorporates “the best of several Social media platforms” and adds on security and reliability features over that. In addition, the support for Android apk opens up a larger Application eco-system and availability for BB-10 users. BBM has already had a great start to its cross platform offering on Android and iOS devices, and can only grow from here on.
BlackBerry undoubtedly has a lot of lost ground to cover. But it’s in a market like India where the brand is respected and loved by many die-hard loyalists, that it can and will script a turnaround. This turnaround will not be determined through market share numbers, as much as BlackBerry in the hands of those who matter, making it aspirational and profitable once again. Revenue through securing Android and iOS devices in the corporate market is of course, icing on the cake.