New BlackBerry MD: Criticism is One-sided

By Thea Neuman (Google)

As it was expected that some major changes were next on the cards for famous blackberry maker, RIM (Research in Motion), finally cat is out of the bag and Alexandra Zagury has been appointed as RIM’s new MD and VP for Southern Africa and SA.

Soon after Zagury took over her new responsibility, she addressed media and debunked all former negative reports about RIM. While mentioning RIM’s achievements, she commented that though there have been quite a lot of negative reports cropping up in communication media against RIM, they are not portraying a genuine picture of the company.

She said that instead of losing market share, RIM has been showing a consistent performance in budding markets like Mexico, SA and Indonesia.

According to her, US media has been quite harsh towards RIM and depicting a gloomy picture of RIM is absolutely not justifiable, that too when RIM is trying to make a comeback and struggling through hard times.

While lashing out at US media critics, she stated that it’s quite ironical that US, being one of the most developed nations of the world, has nothing great to offer in the telecommunications field.

She also said that media is focusing more on the negative reports and surveys, and relegating RIM’s achievements. She further mentioned that Blackberry has a sound market share presently and is being considered as a leading smartphone brand in countries like Mexico, Nigeria, Colombia, Indonesia, Venezuela etc.

In the European regions, Blackberry is doing great in Spain, Netherlands and UK markets. RIM is proud to mention that Blackberry is topping the charts of smartphones in SA. According to statistical figures, in the month of May, seven out of the top 10 cellphones sold were Blackberry handsets.

Blackberry smartphone has been tagged as “the coolest youth brand” and apart from that, 80% of the 300 topmost companies listed at JSE, make use of RIM’s BlackBerry Enterprise Server product.

Zagury has completed her studies from London School of Economics and has earlier worked with Yahoo, Citibank and CNBC. She ensured that SA Blackberry market share will not erode and soon RIM will be commencing economical plans for Blackberry devices through various operators in order to lure customers who search for low-priced plans.

Apart from defending Blackberry’s market share, Zagury said that she will also explore new ways in order to enhance Blackberry’s position in retail market and will make sure that end-users residing in SA get an up-gradation to recently released Blackberry OS version 7.1

We do agree with Ms. Zagury comments but it is still difficult to ignore RIM’s 9 year low stock slump, and the fact that its share prices have dropped by 75% in the past one year and its market value has been accounted for US$3.5bn, which is less than the half the amount that Microsoft paid to Skype last year.

We just hope that Ms. Zagury turns out to be a right choice made by RIM and RIM doesn’t lose what it has in its hands at present. After all it’s better to err while taking caution instead of chalking out some risky new strategies.