14 DAY TRIAL // Canadian smartphone vendor BlackBerry officially announced its third major smartphone licensing deal with Indian company Optiemus Infracom Ltd, which will manufacture and sell BlackBerry smartphones to 1.5 billion potential smartphone users in India.
In November last year, BlackBerry partnered with Optiemus, a telecommunications company that sold the first mobile phone in India in 1995. Today, Blackberry announced that the two companies entered into a long-term licensing agreement, BlackBerry’s first after the partnership with TCL Communications and third overall.
BlackBerry will be licensing device software and brand assets to Optiemus, who will be responsible for designing, selling, promoting and supporting BlackBerry-branded smartphones in India and neighboring markets, like Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh.
BlackBerry will handle security updates
The Canadian company has also announced that it will be handling security updates to BlackBerry-branded smartphones manufactured and sold by Optiemus. BlackBerry is looking to transition to a security software and services company, while this latest deal allows license holders to design, manufacture and sell BlackBerry smartphones all over the world.
“This partnership will allow us to further extend the BlackBerry software experience in a region which is slated to become a hotbed of mobile growth and innovation,” said Alex Thurber, Senior Vice-President and General Manager of the Mobility Solutions Division at BlackBerry.
BlackBerry now has three hardware licensing partners, Optiemus Infracom Ltd., TCL Communications, and BB Merah Putih in Indonesia.
Back in December, BlackBerry announced that Chinese company TCL Communications would manufacture and sell BlackBerry-branded smartphones running Android, in many markets from around the world. TCL was licensed to design, manufacture, sell and support BlackBerry phones, while the Canadian company would develop security and software solutions for the units.
This didn’t come as a surprise, considering that TCL was the developer of BlackBerry DTEK50 and DTEK60 phones announced last year. For this year, TCL intends to announce several BlackBerry smartphones during MWC 2017, set to start later this month.