BusinessWeek has an interesting article about Research in Motion‘s effort to grow through selling software and services to other manufacturers of mobile handsets. The company has reached agreement with 70 mobile carriers around the world to provide BlackBerry email service to some of their customers. The article also mentions that RIM provides access to data services and applications from Bloomberg Financial Markets, SAP, and PeopleSoft.
The biggest issue I have with this article is that it treats the rate of growth of the BlackBerry hardware platform with suspicion. It’s as if the reporters think that the BlackBerry platform shouldn’t be growing as fast as it is now that RIM has announced it is doing strategic alliances with other handset manufacturers and mobile carriers. The article even draws parallels between the existing BlackBerry devices and early Apple Macintosh computers.
One good question about the facts in the article was asked by Aaron Johnson on Blackberry Blog:
One tidbit that stuck out to me was the note that carriers pay RIM between $5 & $10 per subscriber. Is that per month or year? If BlackBerry has 2 million subscribers and gets $10 per month for each subscriber, that’s $240 million dollars per year they get in revenue through subscriptions. Wow.
I kind of doubt that RIM gets $10 per subscriber per month from mobile carriers. For instance, it’s hard to believe that T-Mobile USA would offer unlimited Internet access for a BlackBerry 7230 at $29.99 per month if it was paying RIM $10.00 of that.
I think there’s a lot of interesting information in the BusinessWeek article, even if the worries about RIM’s execution of its growth strategy are a bit exaggerated.