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rfmcdonaldWriting for The Globe and Mail, Iain Marlow describes how Canada's staggering Blackberry managed to lose the very promising Indonesian market.
On an upper floor of central Jakarta’s bustling Ambassador mall, Steven Chandra stands behind a white counter with displays for gleaming new smartphones from Samsung, Lenovo and HTC. A few years ago, such brands would have been highly unfashionable in Indonesia, where BlackBerry was the only device that mattered.
[. . .]
In 2011, BlackBerry accounted for 43 per cent of new smartphones shipped to Indonesia, according to global research firm IDC. That market share has now crumbled: In the first half of 2014, BlackBerry had just 3 per cent of the market.
[. . .]
“BlackBerry became more and more boring, we didn’t see any innovation,” says Gupta Sitoru, who works in communications for a robotics company in Jakarta and traded his BlackBerry for an iPhone. “Then again, we don’t care. People are moving on from BlackBerry.”
In a detailed interview in Jakarta, BlackBerry’s former country head Andy Cobham, a veteran of Indonesian telecom who also managed Motorola’s business here for nearly a decade, said BlackBerry had fantastic technology and grew its business here to remarkable levels before things began to fall apart. Some of the missteps, he said, came from having to route everything he did through Waterloo. A prime example of this, he said, was the company wanting to push ahead with a widely advertised promotion for a 50-per-cent discount for the first 1,000 customers to show up for a BlackBerry launch. Local leadership advised against doing this because it might lead to a stampede – which is exactly what happened. The subsequent launch turned chaotic, leading to dozens of injuries.
“BlackBerry was a world-class product, Waterloo just mismanaged it,” said Mr. Cobham over coffee at a luxury mall in Jakarta, where he now works for a business consultancy. “They were not global players. They were small town.”
