India launch of Z30: BlackBerry goes for aggressive pricing

New Delhi: BlackBerry today launched the Z30 smartphone in India at a price of Rs 39,990.The 5-inch smartphone with a full HD screen, a dual-core processor, quad-core graphics, and an eight megapixel camera, will hit the stores in India next week.

BlackBerry executives at the launch said that as far as the price of the Z30 is concerned, they believe the smartphone is aggressively priced.

BlackBerry India Managing Director Sunil Lalvani also said that as far as BlackBerry was concerned it has two premium devices in India.

“The Z30 is our touchscreen premium device while the Q10 is the premium device in the QWERTY category,” said Lalvani.

[caption id=“attachment_1192179” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  The new Z30.[/caption]

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The Q10 which was launched at a price of Rs 44,990 is more expensive than the latest Z30.

As far as a cheaper BlackBerry 10 device is concerned, Lalvani made it clear that the company has no intention of chasing the sub $100 category of smartphones.

“We don’t see BlackBerry launching an under $100 device in the near future,“he said.

It’s clear that BlackBerry India is sticking to its guns of aiming for the corporate CEOs and boardroom members. If one were to look at the price segment and audience that BlackBerry is targetting, the Z30’s pricing makes absolute sense.

When compared with recently launched phones in India, the Z30 is actually the cheapest among the premium phones. The Galaxy Note 3 was launched at a price of Rs 49,990, the iPhone 5s will hit the stores at Rs 54,000 for the 16 GB model, while the Nokia Lumia 1020 was launched at Rs 49,990.

In short where premium smartphones are concerned, get ready to shell out Rs 40k and above.

As far as marketing strategy of the Z30 is concerned, BlackBerry plans to set up 20 demonstration zones across BlackBerry Premium Stores and BlackBerry Exclusive Stores in the country.

Ashish Gupta, BlackBerry’s Marketing head, who spoke to Firstpost at the launch said that the idea behind the zones was that users need to experience the device to like it.

“We did a study where we found that it takes users 17 to 18 minutes to figure out how to use a new smartphone. With a proper demo station, we’re hoping to show off all the best and latest features of the BB Z30 and the new BlackBerry 10.2 OS to customers,” he said.

BlackBerry also confirmed at the launch that the new BlackBerry 10.2 OS would officially be available for download to BB Z10 and BB Q5 users this week.

When asked whether BlackBerry would set up demo stations in bigger retail stores such as Croma, Gupta said, “We’ll hope for that in our second phase of marketing. Currently we’re hoping to show off some features of the Z30 like the Miracast (allows users to project content from the screen of smartphones onto a compatible television set), Natural Sound technology and the latest features of the new BB 10.2 operating system.”

As far as the future of BlackBerry is concerned, Lalvani insisted that BlackBerry is not down and out.

“We are here to stay. We have $2 billion in cash reserves and zero debt. We are not going down financially,” he said, more than once at the launch.

He pointed out that the 10 million Android and iOS downloads of BBM as evidence of this fact. Lalvani also spoke about the BlackBerry 10 Enterprise Server saying it has received tremendous response from enterprise customers.