A third of UK BlackBerry Z10 buyers are new to BlackBerry
BlackBerry. on Tuesday said many of the early buyers of the BlackBerry Z10 smartphone are new to the company’s mobile platform
At a conference for the company’s enterprise customers and developers in San Francisco on Tuesday, Richard Piasentin, U.S. Managing Director BlackBerry, said more than half of the customers who have purchased the Z10 in Canada since its launch there are new to the BlackBerry family.
Piasentin said more than 33% of Z10 buyers in the U.K. are also new to the platform. A company representative added that the figures from the U.K. and Canada were based on preliminary data gathered from early sales.
BlackBerry is working to make the new platform and its associated handsets appeal to both its base of corporate customers as well as consumers.
The latter has become a notable weak point for BlackBerry, as policies known os BYOD (bring your own device) have allowed smartphone users to pick their own devices for the workplace.
“Somewhere in the past, we stopped listening a bit,” Piasentin said at the event on Tuesday. “That created a lot of the issues that we have seen over the last 18 months.”
“I want to say, on behalf of everyone at BlackBerry, that those days are over,” he added.
That’s true. It should be interesting to see the actual figures when they are released.
Unfortunately, the BYOD phenomena in the last 18 months put people into 2 and 3 year contracts, so those potential clients are indisposed for the next 6 to 18 months.