Samsung Electronics, the leader in India's smartphone market, is aggressively pursuing a strategy to move beyond individual users and sell phones to businesses, putting Canadian phonemaker BlackBerry's dominance in the Indian enterprise market in jeopardy.
Last week, at a strategic meeting of its senior executives in Hyderabad, the South Korean device-maker revealed its new focus on enterprise market and said by year-end it wants at least 10% of its revenues coming from enterprise customers.
In 2012 financial year, Samsung saw its India sales growing 150% to touch Rs 5,942 crore, according to trade journal Dataquest, with a little over half of that coming from sale of phones. Samsung has a 45% share in India's smartphone market, but limited mostly to individual users rather than enterprises. "We want enterprise business to contribute about 10% of our revenues this year and almost a quarter of our global revenues by 2020. We are convinced that we can do it," said Uday Bhat, Samsung India director for IT solutions business.
Enterprise mobile business refers to the sale of mobile handsets and solutions to corporations, whose senior executives can use it for communication as well as dedicated access to business software and enterprise data.
While Samsung leads in the consumer segment, the enterprise mobile market is seen as a stronghold of BlackBerry, which gets 50% of its revenues from it.
The Indian market is critical for BlackBerry, which has been losing market share in developed markets to Apple's iPhone and phones based on Google's Android operating system such as those made by Samsung. With its new Blackberry10 software platform, the company is looking to make a comeback, especially in an emerging market like India.
"In the Asia-Pacific region, an increasing number of firms today prefer the Android platform and this could really help Samsung," said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at technology research firm Gartner.
Gupta said the South Korean firm has been adding partners and mobile application developers to attract the attention of Indian corporate customers.
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