BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) is making progress in African markets particularly in Nigeria and South Africa through its BBM services.
The company’s advertising strategy and content partners have attracted partnerships with payment providers. Africa is highly oriented towards the mobile markets especially because most people use mobile devices to access the internet. The number of online registrations has also escalated in recent times, and Blackberry has managed to take advantage of these growth factors through BBM.
BBM has 26 million registered users throughout the continent, but the majority of the users come from South Africa and Nigeria. There are almost 10 million visits to the BBM shop on a monthly basis and more than 26 million ad requests every day. These numbers have pushed Africa’s position into one of the major markets where monetization strategies are being rolled out and adopted.
Blackberry recently announced plans to launch mobile payment in Africa. The project will introduce a mobile transaction platform on BBM through which users can transfer funds or airtime with the same level of ease used to transfer files and images. The project will allow the company to push growth and enhance its presence in the emerging markets in Africa.
The project will initially be launched in Nigeria where BBM already has a substantial number of users before expanding to other countries. The company reported that more than half a million new users join BBM every month.
The new mobile payment service is expected to help push bigger margins. Blackberry also revealed that the two major markets in Africa are also among the top revenue-generating markets in the world despite the fact that they are viewed as developing markets. They are therefore some of the most opportunistic markets for the company.
The company already has the mobile payments services in Indonesia. Blackberry’s senior VP for emerging solutions announced the expansion of the service into Africa through a blog post. He also announced a partnership with Nigeria’s Interswitch Limited and Mobile Media Info Tech (MMIT) as part of the launch in the country.
