Research in Motion, the company behind Blackberry, has opened Lifestyle, its first retail store in Indonesia.
The 115sqm store cost Rp3 billion (US$330,000) and is located at Mal Kelapa Gading Mall in North Jakarta.
Increasing local demand for smartphones spurred RIM to open a Blackberry retail store in the country.
“Why Indonesia? Because it is a place where people love BlackBerry. Everywhere I go, I see families are having dinner in a restaurant and every single person at the table has a BlackBerry device,” said Rohilesh Singh, Research In Motion’s country director for Indonesia.
RIM is planning to open more stores next year as the number of Blackberry users continues to grow there.
“Next, we are going to open 10 to 12 more stores inside malls in Jakarta, as well as other big cities like Surabaya, Bandung, Semarang, Yogyakarta and Medan. The investment in total would be around Rp 20 billion,” said Andreas Thamrin, operations director at Global Teleshop, which manages the BlackBerry store.
Global Teleshop has 250 outlets in Indonesia of which 40 per cent of its sales are brought by Blackberry devices.
Market intelligence firm IDC has predicted that Blackberry market share in Indonesia will hike to 42 per cent by the end of this year and an annual shipment of 9.7 million by 2015.
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