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BlackBerry now available for corporate customers

(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-04-28 10:10

After more than eight years, BlackBerry, the wildly popular handheld communication device that has become a staple for business leaders around the world, is now available in China.

Blackberry devices are seen in this March 3, 2006 file photo. BlackBerry was made available in China in March to select corporate customers.[Agencies]

Research in Motion (RIM), the Canadian company that makes the device, confirmed in an exclusive interview recently with China Business Weekly that BlackBerry was made available in China in March to select corporate customers. The company would not say when it plans to roll out the product for the public.

"China's great opportunity and we're very excited about being in China. We want to be here in the long-term and we feel that as China continues to grow and ascend on the world stage - economically, politically, business-wise - it's a great opportunity for us to be here," says Norm Lo, RIM's vice-president Asia-Pacific.

"We're excited about the fact that we're ramping up business in China. You'll start to hear more about it as we gear up the sales and marketing activities."

BlackBerry's arrival in China, the company's last major global frontier, has been a long time coming. The Waterloo, Ontario-based company fi rst applied to register BlackBerry in the country in 1999. In 2002 it announced plans to enter the Chinese market and, two years later, signed a letter of intent with China Mobile, the country's largest cellphone carrier.

But regulatory hurdles delayed BlackBerry's China debut. Last June, after 8 years, RIM was granted approval from the Ministry of Information Industry to sell BlackBerry in China.

At the time, RIM said it expected to begin selling the device sometime in 2007. A Beijing-based RIM manager said 5,000 advance orders had already been received, according to media reports at the time.

Lo says that the BlackBerry 8700 Series was certifi ed by RIM's partners in China last fall and was rolled out in March. Initially, RIM plans to target corporate consumers, especially multinational companies that are already familiar with the product and its benefi ts. It's a strategy the company has adopted in other markets too, Lo says.

The company will then target small- and mediumsized enterprises before tackling China's vast consumer market.

"We're working very closely with China Mobile and our partners to make it a coordinated go-to-market strategy," says Lo, who has worked with RIM for over eight years and had held his current post based in Hong Kong for the last three.

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