Carphone Warehouse Tightens Relationship with RIM

Carphone Warehouse, the popular retailer of mobile phones, is reportedly looking into its relationship with Canadian mobile phone maker Research In Motion, with a clear aim to tighten their collaboration. It seems that the company is looking into securing the exclusive availability of various color versions of RIM's future devices and not only that.

“We are building a closer relationship with RIM. Our aim is to provide a differentiated proposition for the customer, and we are working towards that aim by sealing more exclusives,” Carphone Commercial Director Graham Stapleton said, according to Mobile News. “We have had a lot of success in the past with RIM and work very closely with it to provide a solution that consumers want,” he added.

Carphone Warehouse and RIM have a history together, the news site also notes. Back in 2008, the retailer managed to secure exclusivity on a pink variant of the Pearl 8110, after which it had the exclusive right to sell the Curve 8520 in violet, something that happened in July 2009. Establishing a closer relation with RIM would offer the company the possibility to deliver more exclusive variants of the handset vendor's phones.

At the same time, Mobile News also talks about a previous issue the two partners reportedly had sometime before Christmas. RIM was said at that time to have warned Carphone Warehouse about the distribution of BlackBerry mobile phones on the grey market, but Stapleton denied any rumors regarding such state of facts.

“We don’t wholesale BlackBerry and we have not been in talks with it about this. BlackBerry sales have been very strong and feature heavily in our point-of-sale material. We don’t rely on wholesaling of products,” he stated. Carphone was warned by Nokia too about the selling of massive volumes of the Nokia 5530 on the grey market, and it seems that the retailer has stopped the trade.