Blackberry Rising

By Thea Neuman (Google)

RIM’s top management is currently going through drastic transformations and a new MD has been appointed a few days back for South Africa region. The new MD, Alexandra Zagury, has earlier worked with Yahoo and handled operations in Europe. She revealed about how she plans to chalk out turnaround strategies for the company and how she plans to keep BB users happy and satisfied by rolling out economical service plans.

After a 9 year stock slump, there came another disappointment for RIM on Wednesday when it landed up at $6.81 a share at Nasdaq, which is a sharp plunge after 5 year high figure which was $144.56 in 2008.

In spite of such ongoing turmoil, new MD for SA is determined to keep a leveled head and is full of optimism and enthusiasm. She brought forward the positive strengths of RIM by divulging that in spite of major losses, RIM has a decent amount of cash balance which accounts to more than $2 billion. It has a good amount of credit capacity which accounts for about $350 million, 78 millions loyal BB subscribers over different parts of the world, and most importantly the company doesn’t have any debt obligations.

Out of all the Fortune 500 companies, 90% are customers of RIM and out of leading JSE 300 companies, 80% are running Blackberry Enterprise Server.

There is a lot of hue and cry after the announcement of postponing the upcoming BB 10 phones. Ms Zagury commented that there is a big difference between developing features for the BB 10 platform and integrating the same features in the platform. According to her, it is the integration aspect which is basically responsible for delaying up the release.

She added further that it is not about the quality aspect of the features that is creating hindrance in the release; it is about the time which is being consumed in dealing with the integration aspect as the company will be approaching global customers.

After much toing and froing, the company pushed the scheduled release dates to the first quarter of 2013. She also revealed that though the company is gearing up for BB 10 launch, but it will still continue to focus on BB 7.

According to the RIM, SA is one of the most significant markets, offering huge growth opportunities, because this is where BB devices are performing outstandingly. In May 2012, Among 10 best sellers in smartphone category, 7 devices turned out to be of Blackberry, and nothing can be a bigger proof of popularity enjoyed by BB devices in the SA region.

While divulging the plans for sustaining loyal SA users, Ms. Zagury said that she will ensure that South African BB users do get upgraded to the latest developments taking place in products as well as services. And this will be not just for consumers residing in SA region, but for other users as well.

Regarding adding more apps to Blackberry App World, she said that her company is concerned about increasing the number of apps, keeping the quality factor intact. There has been a 220% increase in the number of apps within one year and now total number of BB apps accounts for more than 90,000.

Developers have handed over about 25,000 apps for Playbook to the App World of BB and the counting is still on.

All these positive factors certainly assure that RIM doesn’t need to hit the panic button and it just needs to remain focused on producing quality products and services.