TORONTO (Reuters) – International wireless giant Vodafone Group Plc and BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd announced a partnership on Monday as RIM seeks to broaden the BlackBerry’s reach.
Vodafone, the world’s biggest mobile phone company by revenue, saidit will add the BlackBerry system to its lineup as one of its"preferred consumer operating platforms."
The deal builds on RIM’s strategy of targeting the broader retailconsumer market and moving away from its traditional dependence oncorporations and big government departments.
"This deepening of the strategic relationship between the twocompanies will see Vodafone and RIM concentrating on driving continuedgrowth in business segments, and specifically, focusing on growingbroader adoption in the consumer segment," the two said in a statement.
In the past, the BlackBerry smartphone was ubiquitous amongexecutives, lawyers, politicians and other professionals, but it hadfailed to gain a similar hold among nonbusiness users.
By offering multimedia-heavy handsets such as the BlackBerry Pearl,RIM has been changing that. More than a third of the Waterloo,Ontario-based company’s subscribers are now classified as noncorporateor nongovernment. It had a total of 12 million users at the end of thequarter ended December 1.
RIM shares were up $3.11, or 3.5 percent, at $93 on the Toronto Stock Exchange on Monday morning.
(Reporting by Wojtek Dabrowski; Editing by Peter Galloway)
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