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Wireless solutions leader upbeat about China market

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2008-11-07 17:06

The top management of a world-leading wireless solutions provider said on Friday that the current world financial crisis might be an opportunity to compel Chinese economy to be more fluid, transformative and value-added.

Jim Balsillie, co-CEO of Research In Motion (RIM), a Canadian IT company that offers the reputed BlackBerry mobile handsets and wireless solutions, said in an exclusive interview with Xinhua, "Nobody likes the crisis, but it puts greater urgency on China to step towards the next stage."

"Because it emerges so fast while having not so much infrastructure legacy," Balsillie said, "China is actually more ready to transform approaches on running the economy, from financial to banking, and from business productivity to high technology."

"Faced with opportunities and challenges as well, China has a lot of room to replace the traditional strategies with value-added ones," Balsillie said.

Based on his confidence on the Chinese economy and the market, Balsillie helped RIM land on the world's biggest mobile telecommunication market, with more than 600 million cell phone users. It cooperated with the Chinese state-owned mobile telecom service provider China Mobile in 2006 to proliferate its innovative handsets and wireless solutions to Chinese clients, mainly corporate ones.

The second quarter financial report showed RIM clinched $2.58 billion of revenues in the second quarter of this year, with a quarter-on-quarter increase of 15 percent and a sharp growth of 88 percent compared with the same period last year.

The biggest chunk of the revenues were from BlackBerry smart phones. There are more than 19 million BlackBerry users worldwide, mostly well-positioned business people.

As China is building the third-generation mobile networks, such as TD-SCDMA and SCDMA, service providers would have more incentives to offering value-added services on those fancy networks.

"RIM can push various innovative applications to satisfy much more diversified needs of our customers," Balsillie said.

Founded in 1984 in Waterloo, Ontario of Canada, RIM started its extraordinarily fast market expansion in North America. One killer's application of BlackBerry systems was real-time delivery of time-sensitive information like emails, which successfully won high-end cell phone users in North America and Europe.

To keep its innovative edges, RIM usually invests 15 to 20 percent of sales revenues on research and development. "We have a culture of innovation which focuses on new ideas, collaboration and transparency," Balsillie said.

"We carefully look on what people are doing on the Internet and provide BlackBerry users interface to wise applications, good designs and great engineering," the co-CEO said.