[sandman10]

BlackBerry encouraged by early Z10 sales, CEO says - The Globe and Mail

[00stryder]

“I was surprised when we launched in India how well the Z10, which is a high-end device, sold,” said Mr. Heins. “We shipped into the channel product that we thought would have been good for at least five days and I got an emergency call from our manager in India, saying that they were sold out in two days,”

“Now we are scrambling to re-load that channel.”

Now that's what I like to hear!

[Enyigma]

Interesting to read the comment on India. TH stated they shipped what was thought to be 5 days worth of sales and they were sold out in two days. If the 35,000 figure is correct, then they should have shipped closer to 90,000 units instead. We're obviously not talking huge numbers, but added up over all the markets entered so far, the scale of total sales is looking interesting.

TH did speak at Communitech today (a conference with keynote speakers dealing with leadership in the tech industry). He spoke of the challenges of finding the right people in the face of a direction change in the company. He truly believes BB is now on the path to success. A link to the video on his address is below:

CTV Kitchener | Video - Breaking News Videos, News Videos

[pooger]

The fact that they only sent 5 days of product sounds incredibly novice. Makes the whole thing lose credibility.

Sent from my BlackBerry 9930

[BThunderW]

Testing the waters so to speak. Don't forget the fact that the Z10 is selling for huge premium in India. They probably didn't expect many sales.

The fact that they only sent 5 days of product sounds incredibly novice. Makes the whole thing lose credibility.

Sent from my BlackBerry 9930

[00stryder]

The fact that they only sent 5 days of product sounds incredibly novice. Makes the whole thing lose credibility.

Sent from my BlackBerry 9930

Not if the region is known to primarily purchase lower end phones and high end ones haven't sold like gangbusters in the past. The only "novice" mistake I would say BlackBerry made was underestimating how much people want the Z10 and the number of people that have been waiting for BB10 to arrive. Don't forget all of the displeasure with the price point when the Indian carriers announced their pricing.

[Shanerredflag]

Appears people are tired of the big two...can't speak for the other 8 billion people on earth but I was.

Posted via CB10

[RubberChicken76]

The fact that they only sent 5 days of product sounds incredibly novice. Makes the whole thing lose credibility.

What if they ship to the distributors weekly so as to not stuff the channel?

[kfh227]

The fact that they only sent 5 days of product sounds incredibly novice. Makes the whole thing lose credibility.

Sent from my BlackBerry 9930

Ya, with intent to restock in 5 days. What's odd about this? It's called just in time manufacturing. less time warehousing stock is less money spent on the building, the lights in the building, the heating for the building, the cooling for the building, the taxes on the building, the insurance on the building (and stock).

This is how things are done these days.

[travaz]

Remeber this is the era of "just in time" shipping and stocking. A 747 can hold a **** of a lot of Z10 and can be available anywhere on the face of the globe in 24 hours.

[Sqoon]

The fact that they only sent 5 days of product sounds incredibly novice. Makes the whole thing lose credibility.

Sent from my BlackBerry 9930

It is called jit manufacturing. They are likely doing weekly shipments. They don't want to ship too much infrequently, that is how you **** off your customers.

Posted via CB10

[pooger]

What if they ship to the distributors weekly so as to not stuff the channel?

Well if that was the case then it wouldn't be considered an "emergency". He's making a hyperbole then. Call yourself sold out temporarily and just wait 3 days lol.

IF they were really sending every 5 days then a quote such as "now we are scrambling to reload that channel" wouldn't make sense.

Sent from my BlackBerry 9930

[pooger]

Remeber this is the era of "just in time" shipping and stocking. A 747 can hold a **** of a lot of Z10 and can be available anywhere on the face of the globe in 24 hours.

A lot of the same responses here so I'll just answer it here: if it was "just in time" manufacturing and phones could be anywhere in 24 hrs, heins would not make a comment like "we are now scrambling to reload that channel". They would just reload it.

Sent from my BlackBerry 9930

[helis4life]

Well if that was the case then it wouldn't be considered an "emergency". He's making a hyperbole then. Call yourself sold out temporarily and just wait 3 days lol.

IF they were really sending every 5 days then a quote such as "now we are scrambling to reload that channel" wouldn't make sense.

Sent from my BlackBerry 9930

forcing people to wait to buy your product for 3 days? That doesnt seem like a good business plan. They sent enough stock that they anticipated would have lasted 5 days until they planned to send more. It could be an emergency now if all currently built units are allocated elsewhere. Its not rocket surgery

[helopilot06]

You are spot on. its selling for a price in India that I wouldn't pay the equivalent for here in the US. If I remember correctly its in excess of $900 US. In the Indian market that's a huge retail pricetag that they intially caught a lot of investor flack for.

[bahandi]

A lot of the same responses here so I'll just answer it here: if it was "just in time" manufacturing and phones could be anywhere in 24 hrs, heins would not make a comment like "we are now scrambling to reload that channel". They would just reload it.

Sent from my BlackBerry 9930

If they were truly following the JIT mentality, scrambling is exactly what they would be doing.

If they truly believed what they sent would last 5 days, then they wouldn't have any extra inventory that they could send.

If delivery really only takes a day, then that means they could manufacture 5 days of stock in 4 days, ship them over, wash, rinse, repeat.

Realistically, manufacturing tends to take a break doing the weekend, where as consumers tend to make their purchases 7 days a week.

[Tim-ANC]

Remeber this is the era of "just in time" shipping and stocking. A 747 can hold a **** of a lot of Z10 and can be available anywhere on the face of the globe in 24 hours.

Exactly right. I'm in air freight. JIT and global economy are the cornerstones of the business.

Sent by portable transceiver on 1800MHz

[Enyigma]

Further to the comments TH made at Communitech, he is under no illusion that BB has achieved success yet. More detail of what he said at the Communitech conference is at the article at the link below:

Sales promising, but too early to celebrate, BlackBerry chief says | therecord

It is a fairly long article so I won't post the text here unless people actually ask for it.

TH makes quite positive but very cautious statements. This is tough to admit for a CEO that wants his product to indeed be a success, but it gives him a heck of a lot of credibility. Some other folk lose credibility when they tout success with competing platforms and products where that success has yet to be achieved and questions remain as to whether there may be any success at all.

TH also gives Mike Lazaridis a lot of credit for his efforts to fund and build educational and research facilities. TH sees that as one of the reasons he feels BB does not need to move to another location. There are plenty of local talent that BB can hire to fill important positions and the tech hub at Waterloo is significant enough to be on the world map. He also challenges local businesses to help fill in the gaps that BB can't do on its own.

[GoJaysGo]

I got an emergency call from our manager in India...

“Now we are scrambling to re-load that channel.”

This is more concerning to me than positive. This to me is a rookie mistake from a rookie CEO, that doesn't seem to have a pulse on his client base or supply chain. I call shenanigans on this story. A company the size of RIM, has to have a staff that just deals in supply chain and market analysis, etc. For Heins to not foresee this apparent "high demand" for the Z10 is short sighted at best. They should have learnt something from selling in Canada and the UK, weeks before this launch. Since RIM's books are closed for Q4 (March 2nd), it'll be interesting to see if they can provide an actual sales number and not a shipped number.

[adrenaline_x]

Do you need robots to perform rocket surgery? I would like to know more about this.

TL;DR - Robots for the win.

[9700 zzz Z10]

I think I remember some quote about scarcity making something a commodity...

[pooger]

forcing people to wait to buy your product for 3 days? That doesnt seem like a good business plan. They sent enough stock that they anticipated would have lasted 5 days until they planned to send more. It could be an emergency now if all currently built units are allocated elsewhere. Its not rocket surgery

If it was so easy to reload that channel, then it's fine to send just enough for 5 days and then send more the next week, but judging from heins's comment about "scrambling" and "emergency", it's actually not that easy.

If you thought that running out of stock was "really bad" because you were pissing off customers and you were a 7 billion dollar corporation, I don't think you would make this mistake.

Btw did you guys notice the bb india guy quit today? I am a little surprised about that.

Sent from my BlackBerry 9930

[pooger]

I'm a fan of just in time manufacturing if that's what one wants to do, however, if you're going to do jit, you better be doing it correctly. Just because you are doing jit does not allow you to say "oh wow we sold out 2 days you'll have to wait 3 days for us to reload har har oopsie" and get away with it as a pro who does it for a living. That's why it sounds novice.

A simple preorder process or something of the sort would have helped prevent this sort of supply chain issue.

Sent from my BlackBerry 9930

[anoojshah]

A simple preorder process or something of the sort would have helped prevent this sort of supply chain issue.
Sent from my BlackBerry 9930

Pre-ordering is not that easy in markets like India where people do not rely on credit cards to make purchases. Most people will pay in cash or potentially debit cards.

Also, it's hard to estimate demand as the retail structure there is very different with lots of fragmentation at front-lines. It's not like in Canada or US where majority of phones will be sold by carriers selling through their retail stores and big box stores (Best Buy).

In this case, there are thousands of tiny little retailers in various locations who sell the phone in their local market (where local is at the suburb or street corner level - not city).

Different markets require different retail strategies and have their own challenges.

[pooger]

Pre-ordering is not that easy in markets like India where people do not rely on credit cards to make purchases. Most people will pay in cash or potentially debit cards.

When I say pre-order, I do not mean to imply a credit card. What I meant is that they can get a list of people who want phones in order with how many each they are interested in to get a better estimate of how many phones to bring in on launch day so as to prevent the running out of stock by a huge quantity.

One of the posters here on CB made a post about how sales is done by people reserving phones for their friends ahead of time so that when the phones come in, the chosen are notified first of new products and they are given first dibs. If this type of system exists, then there's got to be a way that you can poll the buyers to get an estimate of what they might be looking for on the day of. If their excuse is "well it's really quite random", that means they don't even understand their own market and are probably novices.