While reading the business news, I came across an article that stated how despite of the losses the Canadian Multinational telecommunications and wireless equipment company – Blackberry is making in North America, it is still one of the dominating brand in Indonesia. As of 2016, there are more than 6 million Blackberry users in Indonesia.

A week ago, BlackBerry, decided to step away from producing its its signature hardware products and focus more on research and development of its software and its application known as the “Blackberry Messenger”. Through examining its market, Blackberry has decided to outsource its production through a Joint Venture with PT. TI phone mobile Indonesia known as “BB Merah Putih” (Blackberry red and white). As soon as the news of the Joint Venture was released, the shared of TI mobile immediately rose by 4.7 percent.

Both of the companies have decided to agree and combine all the resources and all their information. BB Merah Putih is responsible for sourcing, manufacturing and distributing the handsets throughout Indonesia.

This external growth strategy that Blackberry has planned to adopt will have its own pros and cons.

• One of the biggest advantage of having a Joint Venture would be that if the sales are still low, both of the companies will dissolve, it would not lose its legal existence or its identity
• As Blackberry is the most popular in Indonesia, this joint venture will allow the company to provide the types of products that meets the local consumers’ needs, wants and expectations. Through this, it is expected that Blackberry will gain a larger market share.
• Blackberry will  be able to gain a level of expertise without actually hiring anymore staff.
• Through this, Blackberry may also establish its presence in new untested markets.
• This joint venture will allow  Blackberry to completely focus on its core activity and that it is to develop a better software and improve its ‘BBM’ application.  On the other hand, The new joint venture company (BB Merah Putih) will fully focus on the Indonesian market.

Conceptually, a joint venture is a form of a partnership and every partnership run a risk of disagreement amongst the partners. Disagreements and miscommunication seems to be quite prevalent in this joint venture as both of the companies are in different environments and the overall company culture is different and may clashing against each other. All these may cause misunderstandings and may slow down or even disrupt their decision making.

Although Blackberry has been having diminishing performance in these past couple years, I am looking forward to see how this new strategy would turn out to be and how it will affect its stakeholders.

 

 

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Bibliography:

• “Blackberry Still a Big Hit in Indonesia.” N.p., n.d. Web. <https://www.thestar.com/business/2016/09/30/blackberry-still-a-big-hit-in-indonesia.html>.
• “BlackBerry’s First Software and Brand-licensing Deal: A Joint Venture in Indonesia Called BB Merah Putih.” N.p., n.d. Web. <http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/28/blackberry-joint-venture-bb-merah-putih/>.
• “BlackBerry Abandons Its Phone.” N.p., n.d. Web. <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/29/technology/blackberry-phones-earnings-q2.html?_r=0>.