Gregory Wade, VP - Asia-Pacific, Research in Motion spills details about the company’s expansion in the Indian market and strategy to sustain competition from other smartphones.

How has the Indian market shaped up for RIM?

Firstly, we are pleased with the attraction we have seen in the Indian market for the past three years. We are also quite impressed with the brand awareness and penetration of BlackBerry in both traditional as well as corporate and SMB segments.

Besides, we are happy with the relationship we have across Airtel and Hutch. I think they both have done a great job in promoting BlackBerry not only as an e-mail platform but also as a fully functional platform. The future of BlackBerry in India looks very rosy.

What kind of growth has the company witnessed in India?

We can’t share any specific numbers, but what we can share is that the Indian market is very strong and encouraging for us. It’s a very tech savvy market and we certainly see strong adoption of smartphones, which is quite visible with the acceptance of BlackBerry. India was the first to launch Pearl, Curve and recently one of the carriers has launched GPS application on BlackBerry 8800.

The overall growth rate has been satisfactory for us and we will continue to invest heavily in terms of sales and marketing perspective here in India.

How difficult was it to establish base in the Indian market?

The way we have entered and flourished in the Indian market with the help of our service providers is very much based on certain key fundamentals that have been successful in countries like the US, Australia, amongst others. We just followed those fundamentals and translated those business practices in the Indian context.

Considering the sturdy competition from other smartphones, how will you sustain BlackBerry’s success in India?

We genuinely welcome competition because in many ways it further emphasiaes the importance of enterprise data communication within the mobile environment. So from the competitive perspective, we stand up very well within the market and from the data communication perspective, it further emphasises the leadership we have established within this category.