Canadian carriers such as Bell, Rogers, TELUS, SaskTel, Fido and others have officially made the BlackBerry Q10 available for sale. The Q10 boasts a physical QWERTY keyboard which is a features that rocketed previous BlackBerry to great heights and has many loyal customers eagerly waiting for the smartphone. When telecom carriers were contacted on the launch day of BlackBerry Q10 to get feedback on the sales of the new smartphone, a majority of them said that tha “response has been well received” and “customer demand is high.” However, consumers demand is best judged three to four weeks after the release of the smartphone. Therefore, three weeks after the launch of the Waterloo-based company’s BlackBerry Q10 Deutsche Bank analyst Brian Modoff got in touch with carriers and reported that the latest BB10 smartphone is meeting expectations in Canada.
Modoff made this claim after getting in touch with 30 retail stores (TELUS, Bell, Rogers) and 30 stores in Canada. After which he said that “BlackBerry has done a better job in Canada.” But Modoff did not provide any exact numbers to give us an exact idea about the sales of the new device. In fact, the analyst just mentioned that the Q10 is “selling well,” “sold out” or stores have “limited stock.” This suggests that Canadians are extremely loyal to the brand and “it was almost a foregone conclusion that handsets would sell well in this geography.”
“The HTC (2498TW) One, Samsung [Electronics (005930KS) S IV, and [Apple (AAPL)] iPhone5 were the most recommended phones. In Canada, the Q10 was selling well in a majority of the stores we contacted. It was sold out in three and had limited stock in several others due to strong sales… Again it appears that Blackberry has done a better job in Canada. The sales representatives were much more effusive about the Q10 and as a result, sales are likely better in this region. Given the captive audience in Canada, we think that it was almost a foregone conclusion that handsets would sell well in this geography.
In the UK, sales representatives were less inclined to discuss the Q10 and only few said the phone was selling well. In sum, this seems similar to the Z10 launch and we think the fact that the Q10 is still getting decent sales airtime in Canada is constructive, especially in light of the recent SIV launch. Overall, we were positively surprised with the results of the Canadian portion of our survey. We thought that Blackberry would be challenged to remain relevant on their home turf, given the recent launch of the SIV.
We still think the company has serious challenges in front of them in terms of declining service revenues, managing two OS platforms and migrating a user base over to an unfamiliar base. While Canada was incrementally positive to the overall story, we believe that the US will likely be a better measure of the company’s longer term outlook.”
Specific sales numbers for BB10 smartphones will surface once BlackBerry will declare its first quarter results on June 28th. Till then other carriers such as Videotron and WIND Mobile will also make the physical QWERTY keyboard handsets available to their customers. Along with the Q10 the first quarter results of the Canadian smartphone maker will also reveal BlackBerry Z10 sales numbers, which till last count has seen sales of more than 1 million units.
Source: MobileSyrup
Photo: Store-T-Mobile
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