BlackBerry banks on new products, privacy features to boost Saudi sales

Despite having lost market share to rivals like Apple and Samsung, BlackBerry is keen on winning over Saudi customers with new product launches and a focus on privacy and security features, Mike Al-Mefleh, Middle East regional director for BlackBerry Mobile, told Argaam.

The brand recently launched its KEYone smartphone in many key markets across the Middle East including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Lebanon, and Oman.  Customer response has been positive so far, Al-Mefleh said.

Manufactured by China’s TCL Communication, the BlackBerry KEYone was unveiled in February this year at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

The phone is the first to be released under a brand licensing agreement between BlackBerry and TCL inked last December, giving TCL the rights to design, manufacture, sell and provide customer support for BlackBerry mobile devices worldwide.

BlackBerry also plans to roll out the KEYone Black edition this month in seven countries: Saudi Arabia, the UAE, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada, and Japan, Al-Mefleh said.

The phone will hit stores in other markets later this year, he added, noting that the KEYone Black boasts some improved specifications, such as 4 gigabytes (GB) of RAM as opposed to 3GB in the silver edition, and 64GB of storage (up from 32GB).

Once a household name in the smartphone segment, BlackBerry’s sales have been hit hard in recent years by competition from brands like Apple and Samsung, and Chinese players like Huawei, Oppo, and Vivo.

Samsung sold 82.5 million smartphones worldwide in Q2 2017, accounting for 22.4 percent of global market share, according to data from technology research firm Gartner. It was followed by Apple with 12.9 percent of the market, Huawei (8.9 percent), Oppo (5.3 percent), and Vivo (4.1 percent).

In the GCC, Samsung led the smartphone market in Q2 with 38.1 percent market share, posting a 0.4 percent quarter-in-quarter (QoQ) increase in shipments, research firm IDC said in a recent report. Apple stood in the second place with 20.9 percent share, but saw its shipments decline 20.2 percent QoQ.

When asked about how BlackBerry is coping with fierce competition in the region’s smartphone segment, Al-Mefleh said the brand hopes to capitalize on its security features as consumers grow increasingly privacy-conscious.

“We bring to the market the most secure Android smartphone and we stand behind this. We deliver in terms of the security and privacy,” he said.

BlackBerry mobiles come preloaded with the DTEK by BlackBerry app, which allows users to improve privacy levels and monitor applications trying to access the phone’s camera, microphone, location, and personal information, he added.

The brand will continue to focus on Saudi Arabia as a priority market, Al-Mefleh said, noting that the country’s population and demographics is a key growth driver.

The Kingdom had over 20 million Internet users and more than 10 million active mobile social accounts in 2016.

“So that gives you an idea of how the market is going to be hungry for something new, for something productive,” Al-Mefleh said. 

Write to Jerusha Sequeira at jerusha.s@argaamnews.com