The announcement comes shortly after the company's subscriber base hit 3 million worldwide earlier this month. Of this, 1 million users were added in the last six months, according to Angelo Fasulo, its Asia-Pacific director. He also noted that 20 percent of its subscribers are from outside North America.
RIM is now looking to establish a bigger presence in China and Korea, but Fasulo declined to indicate when or how the company plans to move into the two markets.
The company has already developed products that support Chinese characters, he said.
RIM broke into the Indian market last October with three BlackBerry models, partnering mobile service provider AirTel to allow users to receive e-mail messages on-the-go.
Also in Singapore, M1 became the latest operator--after StarHub and SingTel--last month to offer services on the RIM device. The mobile operator launched its BlackBerry from Vodafone solution, which is priced based on pre-bundled data volume as well as unlimited local data usage.
RIM is a partner with over 95 network operators in over 40 countries, 14 of which are from the Asia-Pacific region. According to research firm Gartner, the vendor emerged as the worldwide leading seller of PDAs in the first quarter of 2005, growing 75.6 percent over the same period last year.
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Surprisingly there is yet no discussion publicly about RIM/Blackberry in Japan. Surely companies such as Vodafone could bring this technology into Japan. There are Blackberry like solutions out there but none with the unique Berry-like interface of QWERTY keyboard. My office in Tokyo could easily support 20 Blacberry users.
Posted by Steven N. Fontaine on Friday, May 27 2005 09:05 AM