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India telecom 20 years: BlackBerry India MD Sunil Lalvani

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:

 

 

 

 

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.

editor@telecomlead.com

 

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