Blackberry to expand PH market

Filipinos love to text at a rate of 1.5 billion text messages a day.

This makes an executive of  Canadian smartphone brand BlackBerry  confident  of expanding its market as it prepares to ramp up promotion and education efforts through partnerships with telecommunication companies.

John Leung, director for Singapore, Philippines and emerging markets of BlackBerry, said they see the country as a fast growing arena for their brand.

“The Philippines is a top focus area for me because of it’s high potential for our products considering that the Philippines has the 12th largest population and is second to Indonesia in the region,” said Leung at a press conference for the launch of Sun Cellular’s Plan 999 with free BlackBerry Curve phone.

“Based on the market data provided to us, Filipinos send 1.5 billion text messages everyday. We want to promote BlackBerry Messaging (BBM) as another way to send messages and communicate with loved ones here and even abroad. With BBM you can broadcast messages, send files and pictures,” he said.

A similar love for social networking on the Internet shows in statistics that count 26 million Filipinos using Facebook, the seventh largest in the world.

“Blackberry was the first to integrate and collaborate web pages such as Facebook and Twitter, which we’re sure Filipinos would really find as a good value proposition,” said Leung. Discussions are underway with telcos for a three-level tariff system or plans.

“We’d like a plan that only provides for BBM service, then another that already provides service for social networking and browsing, and the third one that allows the user to do all these and download from BlackBerry Apps. We’d like a system for postpaid, prepaid, monthly, weekly or daily,” said Leung.

Leung said there are  50 million users of BlackBerry and subscribers of BlackBerry Data services in the world.