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The strategy of chasing price conscious consumers seems to have failed. Fairly recently, Blackberry was voted "coolest youth brand" in South Africa, while they
by buyx 13y ago
The strategy of chasing price conscious consumers seems to have failed. Fairly recently, Blackberry was voted "coolest youth brand" in South Africa, while they flooded the market with poorly built, cheap Curves (I had a Curve, which took 10 minutes to boot). As bandwidth costs have come down, unlimited BIS has become less important. And people realise that having to give their phones in for fixing every six months is a poor deal.
I sometimes see the argument that a product being popular in the developing world is a ray of hope but Nokia's decline (despite dominating feature phone market with quality phones), along with Blackberry's decline is a signal that third world consumers are not a long-term cash cow.
- speeder 13y agoIf you get a product popular on all the BRICS you can use it as cash cow... Nokia in particular suicided themselves, when they stopped manufacturing Symbian phones they still had 60% of new phones sold in Brazil for example... Since they stopped Symbian and took a while to launch a WP phone, and the WP phones were much more expensive than their Symbian ones, they went from 60% to a negligible amount purely because they did not deliver anything to sell... Now their market is taken over mostly by chinese companies.
- kitcar 13y agoOne reason why Blackberry holds leadership positions in a few markets is they work directly with the government to ensure their products don't get hit by the same import tariffs their competitors do, giving them a very significant price advantage - for example, they started assembling BB's in Argentina a while back for this reason (http://investba.com/2011/07/research-in-motion-blackberry-argentina/ http://investba.com/2011/07/research-in-motion-blackberry-ar...). In the last few years Apple has started to do the same: http://appleinsider.com/articles/12/02/24/apple_begins_selling_iphone_4_units_built_in_brazil http://appleinsider.com/articles/12/02/24/apple_begins_selli...)
- brianbreslin 13y agoIsn't the reason for this because Christina Kirchner's son owns one of the fab plants? And the tarrifs they impose on imports is prohibitive?