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How Are BlackBerry 10 Phones Selling?

By VJ
BlackBerry Z10

Remember how we liked BlackBerry’s new features in the launch last month? Z10 and Q10 are already in the market. In UK, Z10 and Q10 were launched the very next day of the BB 10 keynote on Jan 31. In Canada, the homeland of BlackBerry, the devices were available since Feb 5th.

And in the US, the devices were made available on Feb 10 by a carrier named Solavei, which is a MVNO under T-Mobile (that means it doesn’t have its own network, but operates under T-Mobile’s network). While the official availability may be only in March, Solavei is already selling BB 10 devices, but for a premium price of 999 dollars. That is a thousand bucks for the taste of the new BlackBerry! Is it really worth it? If you note, Microsoft’s Surface Pro tablet PC costs less than that.

We have done an analysis of how the BlackBerry phones have been selling in various markets. The data is not quite available, although we have a little bit.

Google's search trends about BlackBerry has been a little bit revealing. In the recent days, BlackBerry sees a pretty good growth in interest.

If you consider the search growth for the term, 'BlackBerry 10', here it is:

In Canada, BlackBerry itself reported an awesome reception for the smartphone. Thorsten Heins, CEO of BlackBerry mentioned the launch
was more than 50% better than any other launch day in our history in Canada.
That may have been a pretty amazing thing for the company.

BlackBerry issued a statement on 6, Feb that mentioned:
In the UK, we have seen close to three times our best performance ever for the first week of sales for a BlackBerry smartphone.
On 7th, Phones4u, a British retailer of smartphones, has reported that over 55 per cent of the BlackBerry 10 devices have been sold within a week of its launch in the UK. Phones4u has more than 550 stores in the UK.

In an analyst opinion, Aapo Markanen, senior analyst with ABI Research has made the statement:
2013 should be seen as relative success for both Microsoft and BlackBerry. For the end of the year, we expect there to be 45 million Windows Phone handsets in use, with BlackBerry 10 holding an installed base of close to 20 million.
20 million devices out of a total of 1.4 billion is quite a small number. ABI Research’s analysis also tells us about 798 million Android phones should be sold within the end of 2013 (that is 57 per cent of 1.4 billion total devices).

Highly ambitious Thorsten Heins told in an interview with Associated Press:
It’s beyond expectations. White is sold out already. The black is hard to stock up again. It’s very encouraging. I won’t share the number because I need to verify it, but we are getting a substantial number of users moving from other platforms to BlackBerry.
However, Telegraph pointed out that the phones have not been sold out.

Two days ago, Home Depot, one of the largest retailers in the world switched from BlackBerry to iPhone, which was a blow to BlackBerry. Also, Australian department of Treasury quit BlackBerry in favor of Apple iPhone since Feb 6. These high profile quits are bad for BlackBerry’s top position as the chosen communication device provider for businesses and governments.

About the future of BlackBerry and the growth in sales, we do not have the numbers yet. We are actively following BlackBerry’s growth patterns to see if the company gets back in track.


[Update: ]

T-Mobile started selling BlackBerry Z10 by priced at 99 dollars. We will check it out and will update you as soon as possible.


[Update]

BlackBerry Z10 is now available to buy via Best Buy. That device is unlocked. You can get also carrier options like AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile.


[Update: ]

It has been a week ago that BlackBerry announced that a mystery partner placed an order for a million Z10 devices. And today, it has been revealed that the mystery partner is a wireless smartphone supplier known as Brightstar. AllThingsD did report this.


[Update: ]

Another disturbing news for BlackBerry was published by Reuters. So far, BlackBerry Z10 and Q10 have not shown any stellar sales performance. In the market, Apple leads in smartphones with nearly 40 percent of the 'smartphone' market with iPhone, Samsung is at the close second position, then HTC, Motorola, Sony, etc. BlackBerry will probably have to cut down on production.

One thing that I mentioned in other posts as well is that Z10 is priced too high for the features offered. This is probably one thing that BlackBerry really needs to reconsider to come back to business.
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