BlackBerry has 30% market share in Venezuela, trailing only Android's 39%

With a miniscule market share in most countries, BlackBerry usually doesn't show up on the radar. What you normally see is Android and iOS numbers one and two respectively. But in Venezuela, the top two spots belong to Android (39.2%) and BlackBerry (30.92%). This is possible because in the country, iOS has only 4.1% of the market, and the 'others' category accounts for 19.8%. The latter group consists largely of Firefox OS and Symbian users.

Overall, the country boasts a total of 12.66 million smartphones in use. With our trusty abacus in hand, we can tell you that this works out to 3.91 million BlackBerry handsets currently active in the country. There are 4.96 million Android users and only 519,000 Venezuelans that are sporting an Apple iPhone. With a total population of 28.5 million people, smartphone penetration is a rather low 44%. While the country's economy isn't that rich based on GDP per capita, it is the fifth largest oil exporter in the world which means that some day this country could be unmined gold for manufacturers.

The large oil exporting infrastructure could be responsible for BlackBerry's huge share in the country. They are large corporations that crave secure communications. Whatever the reason for its success in Venezuela, you can be sure that BlackBerry CEO John Chen would love to be able to bottle it for use throughout the rest of the world.

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source: Mobiltelefon.ru (translated)

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