By Faisal Kawoosa on April 4th, 2009
Research In Motion, the force behind, perhaps, the most successful wireless device in enterprise domain – Blackberry, announced yet another extraordinary quarter, even in this downturn, when everyone is trying to stabilise than grow.
As per the impressive results for the quarterly (December 2008 – February 2009), the company earned a revenue of $3.46 billion and shipped 7.8 million handsets. Of these 7.3 million handsets were activated during the period. The average selling price for a handset was $370 and revenue from handset sale constituted 83% of the quarterly revenue.
Other segments fetching revenue for the quarter were service ($415 million), software ($59 million) and other revenues ($106 million) that constitutes repairing and servicing of non-warranty products.
The growth of blackberry is across the globe. It is not specified to a particular region or country. This quarter the non North America subscriber base reached one third of the total and countries across Europe, Asia and Middle East showed growth in sales. A lot of operators announced availability of Blackberry services/handsets during the quarter and some of the carriers launched aggressive sale plans. The company in its latest release attributed these offers for its unexpected growth in the quarter.
Blackberry is a strategically positioned handset. It has made its presence in the enterprise domain. Today, half of its customers are in enterprise segment and the remaining are from non-enterprise domain, most of whom must still be in the enterprises. So to push or launch a service in the enterprise domain, Blackberry is definitely the best handheld wireless device. The service will see lot of users and it will be a value addition for Blackberry.
Fixed Mobile Convergence, which essentially must have an IP leg (not the Internet connectivity through GPRS, 3G or data calls, etc.) is primarily attracting the enterprises. Even some studies done on the subject show that more than 70% of the subscribers are from enterprises. In an enterprise environment a WiFi cloud can be used to beam IP over these devices when the user within premises and while on the road the handset uses cellular networks like the GSM or CDMA. Unfortunately, FMC has not taken up in the way it was presumed earlier. There are many reasons, primary to me is that cellular operators are not pursuing this technology as it gives traditionally data service providers an access in to talk business. FMC somehow, brings data operators in direct competition with the cellular operators. Cellular operators on the other hand prefer to push LTE as it is an extension to their networks and technologies for which they need not to acquire capabilities from a different domain.
Whatever the case, if Fixed Mobile Convergence providers have to really make it an impressive service with handsome figures of users and revenues, it must seriously look at Blackberry devices that have their established place within the enterprise domain. Addition of the capability also gels well with the philosophy of Blackberry and it will definitely be a value addition for the existing users. RIM could also make some more money by offering Instant Messaging and VoIP client in their handsets and enable VoIP calls from these devices.
Although, presently even if you subscribe to 3G data services or have a high-end mobile that has WiFi connectivity, one can probably enjoy all the features that Blackberry is offering. The underlying technology may be different but that hardly matter for the end users. Blackberry has undoubtedly made a market of its own which seems to be unshakable in recent times to come. Happy Blackberrying!
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