Users hanging up on BlackBerry
Mobile phone maker’s non-business market expected to slump below 1m this year m Non-business BlackBerry users according to data.
BlackBerry will have fewer than 1 million users outside businesses in the UK by the end of the year, a radical slump from a peak of nearly 8 million in June 2012, according to new research from two companies.
The dramatic fall from grace of the iconic mobile phones, which were blamed for spreading unrest during the London riots of summer 2011, follows a series of high-profile and expensive flops — first with its PlayBook tablet and then with the touchscreen Z10 phone, as it tried to catch rivals such as Samsung and Apple.
The firm has also plunged into operating losses and seen revenues dwindle for 11 of the past 12 quarters. In a bid to cut costs, it has fired thousands of staff.
Now new research from eMarketer provided exclusively to the paints a bleak picture for the company. It says it may have as few as 700,000 non-business users in the UK, and that by 2017 the figure could fall to 400,000.
These latest figures show that even its previously loyal core seems to be leaving in droves Bill Fisher, eMarketer Separately, another research company, Kantar Worldpanel, told the Guardian that although BlackBerry’s data currently shows 1.4 million non-business users, it is losing 56,000 users every month to other platforms such as Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows Phone. “I’d expect we would see fewer than a million people with a BlackBerry as their primary handset around September 2015,” Dominic Sunnebo, global consumer insight director at Kantar, said. The company has not been helped by high-profile missteps, such as a software update last Thursday that left LadyTanni GreyThompson, the paralympic medallist and parliamentarian, bemoaning the random shuffling of her contacts book. She has threatened to dump BlackBerry for another maker.
BlackBerry had not responded to a request for comment by the time of publication.
Kantar’s Sunnebo said the shift pointed to wider challenges in the phone market. “With only 2.1 million customers of old platforms like BlackBerry, Palm, [Nokia] Symbian and [Samsung] Bada left, brands can only really win significant numbers of new customers from consumers already using modern, competitive platforms.”
– Guardian News & Media Ltd