14 DAY TRIAL // We’ve written quite a few reports on BlackBerry Passport and how well the smartphone may or may not have been received on the market.
We have already seen that carriers do not seem to trust the Canadian company’s product anymore, or at least those operators in the UK. Carriers from other countries may have refused to add the Passport to their portfolios as well, but that did not seem to stop BlackBerry from selling almost its entire stock.
BlackBerry reported soon after introducing the Passport that it had sold 200,000 units in the first 48 hours and that the smartphone has been met with strong demand.
It didn’t take too long for the smartphone to go out of stock at Amazon and BlackBerry’s official online store. Even though the Passport was restocked a few times, BlackBerry still has a large amount of orders to fulfill.
As of right now, BlackBerry Passport is officially one hard-to-find smartphone. The information has been recently confirmed by the company’s CEO John Chen during an MIT Enterprise Forum event, The Globe and Mail reports.
“It's a good thing that some people can't buy BlackBerry Ltd.'s Passport phone,” Chief Executive Officer John Chen said. “That means it's popular. I'm glad to have inventory issues. It shows that people want the phone, we took a very conservative approach and didn't order too many.”
The question is how many Passport units BlackBerry ordered in the first place. We can agree that BlackBerry Passport demand exceeded expectations, but weren’t these expectations too low?
It looks like BlackBerry wanted to play safe after the Z10 fiasco, when the company was left with a huge amount of units in stock. It remains to be seen how safe the Canadian company was willing play to have healthy profit without taking too many risks.
BlackBerry's CEO hints to plans to enter on the Chinese market
The good news is BlackBerry Passport is still selling like hot cakes even if it’s not even available in too many countries. However, this is likely to change by the end of the year when BlackBerry Passport should be launched in about 30 countries.
In other news, Chen said during the same event held in Hong Kong last week that his company is interested in entering the Chinese market very soon, “China is too big a market to ignore. It is clear that BlackBerry needs to and should be in that market.”
However, he did not share any other details on when and how BlackBerry plans to make its debut on the Chinese market. Hopefully, more info will emerge sooner rather than later.