OTTAWA (Reuters) - Research In Motion
RIM has notched up more than 5 million subscribers by dominating the corporate market for bankers and lawyers, but it now wants to appeal to a broader audience.
"Beyond the enterprise, we're trying to increase into other channels - the small business market is one that is big, yet it's much more fragmented," said chief financial officer Dennis Kavelman at a Piper Jaffray conference.
"You have to hit a lot more small IT (information technology) managers and small companies to get the same volumes."
The Waterloo, Ontario-based company is counting on cheaper, easier service plans, such as the BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express, as one way to extend its reach into the small business market.
The company hopes that new devices expected on the market this fall will drive demand in the small business and high-end consumer markets.
"We're going to be doing a lot of work to really turbo-charge this part of our business: the small business (and) retail consumer," Kavelman said. "I think that's going to be very, very interesting over the next 12 months for us."
But RIM doesn't plan to shift its focus away from the corporate market. Rather, it wants to get BlackBerrys into more employees hands by promoting the range of applications its devices can operate.
"We are really focused on driving much deeper into the enterprise, rather than just hitting a few users with mail in the executive suite," he said.
RIM's next 5 million users, he said, will still largely reflect a corporate customer base. But a greater percentage will come from international markets, retail, and small business users, he predicted.
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