The latest offering from the Canadian smartphone maker BlackBerry has hit store shelves in Indonesia as the ailing company is pushing to regain its market glory in Southeast Asia’s largest economy.
“Indonesia is a huge market for us,” BlackBerry CEO John Chen said at the launch of the low-priced Z3 smartphone in Jakarta last week.
BlackBerry’s worldwide market share was an alarming 0.6% in the fourth quarter of last year, down from an already weak 3.2% a year earlier, according to mobile market figures released in February by International Data Corporation (IDC).
However, Mr Chen pointed out that the company still had a large enterprise-based market around the world counting governments, law enforcement agencies and banks among its users.
“We stand for security. Governments around the world believe in our security,” said the CEO who took the helm of the company late last year.
However, he said the company wouldn’t give up on the consumer world and was counting on the success of the Z3 in Indonesia, though it hasn’t come up with an official sales target.
“If the market does not receive this product then we would definitely have some negative issues to deal with,” he acknowledged.
According to IDC data, BlackBerry’s market share in Indonesia dropped significantly from 36% in 2012 to 14% last year, but Mr Chen the country remained one of the company’s largest markets in the world.
BlackBerry purposefully designed the Z3 Jakarta edition to win the hearts of Indonesians and to revive its presence in one of the world’s top 10 economies.
The new model includes country-specific features such as a set of stickers featuring cartoon characters of wayang or Indonesian puppet theatre in its popular BBM messaging application. It also boasts a seamless mix of Indonesian and English with local languages, namely Javanese and Sundanese, for typing text.
The two ethnic groups originating from densely populated Java island make up the majority of Indonesia’s 240 million population. It is also tapping into the country’s almost 90% Muslim population with a built-in Indonesian Council of Ulemma (MUI) halal food certification application.
“We were inspired by Indonesians. We had many Indonesian consumer insights when designing this product,” said Maspiyono Handoyo, managing director of Blackberry Indonesia.
The five-inch, full-touchscreen Z3 Jakarta Edition operates on 3G networks and retails for 2,199,000 rupiah (US$191 or 6,250 baht). It is the lowest-priced handset using the BlackBerry 10 operating system compared with other devices such as the Z10 or Q10 which are considered as too pricey for the Indonesian market. A special edition with “Jakarta” inscribed on the back is available for 25,000 users.
Indonesia has 107% mobile phone penetration and 58% unique mobile phone subscribers, according to data compiled by Global Business Guide.
Mr Chen said the new budget device would also be offered in six other emerging economies in Asia including India, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam.
“Thailand is obviously included,” he said, despite acknowledging that the company’s market share has also sunk in Thailand.
Prayudi Aji, the national moderator of 11,000-member Indosat BlackBerry Community, said Indonesians still prefer to use BlackBerry devices because of good battery life.
Prayudi, who has six devices running on BlackBerry, iOS, Windows and Android, based his conclusions on performance tests that involved running several messaging services at the same time on a single device.
“The result shows that the BlackBerry device has a longer battery life compared to other devices,” he said, adding that community members believe BlackBerry security also remains a main draw for loyal users in the country.
Now that Android applications are available on BlackBerry, he said, users might opt for BlackBerry handsets because of the battery-life advantage.
“Indonesian customers are price-sensitive. The Z3 has scrapped some sophisticated features and specs that most Indonesian users don’t need, such as the LTE 4G network or a port connection for slideshow presentations. That reduces the price to the most affordable range for Indonesians, which is 2 million to 3.5 million rupiah,” he said.