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| Blackberry, raspberry, Redberry? |
| Wei Gu / Dec 09, 2009, 00:47 IST |
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China/Blackberry: Research in Motion is hailing China as the next frontier for Blackberry. But don’t expect too much success out of the world’s largest mobile market. Blackberry will not appeal to China’s masses, and some of the expats have already been served out of Hong Kong.
First, the service is too expensive for ordinary consumers. Average mobile phone revenue per user in China is only $10, versus about $50 in the United States. The monthly subscription for Blackberry is almost $90 in China. Only a small number of western companies could afford that, and most of them have already got services from outside China. They might not want to migrate, for fear of service disruption and because of data security concerns.
A big selling point of Blackberries is corporate email security, because they can access emails stored on the so-called virtual private network. But that kind of extra security is not highly valued in China. Many corporations store their emails on the public network, and smart phone users can access them for just $3 a month.
And there is the culture issue. Asians prefer text-messaging to emails. The Chinese and Korean governments, for example, routinely send announcements to reporters via text-messaging, but are slow in responding to emails.
Although China Mobile started selling Blackberries to corporate customers a few years ago, it has not spent much energy promoting the service and penetration has been very low. China Mobile prefers to promote its own model, called Ophone.
As competition heats up in China — China Unicom has begun to sell Apple Inc's iPhone and China Telecom is reportedly aiming to sell Blackberry and Palm smartphones — China Mobile is re-thinking Blackberry as a tool to draw in high-end customers.
Meanwhile, RIM’s North American home market is becoming saturated so it wants gadget-loving Asians to adopt Blackberries. But it will be hard for the pair to fight against local manufacturers which have flooded the market with low-cost smart phones such as Redberries that give people similar functions at only a fraction of the cost.
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