During T-Mobile's Trade-in Promo, 94 Percent of BlackBerry Users Switched to Another Platform

In September 2013, T-Mobile announced that while it would continue to offer BlackBerry devices to its customers, it would no longer stock the smartphones on their shelves. The reason that was given at the time was that these devices were failing to sell in any significant quantity.

Five months later, in the middle of February, I wrote about T-Mobile’s offer to BlackBerry users. Basically the offer was described by T-Mobile as a great offer for BlackBerry customers, and the deal was for BlackBerry customers to switch to an iPhone. This lit a fire under BlackBerry’s new CEO, John Chen, who responded in a blog posting.

One of the things that sparked Chen’s blog was the fact that BlackBerry users were in an uproar about this offer. Not surprisingly, this led to a war of words between the two CEOs. The result was T-Mobile’s offering of free expedited shipping on BlackBerry smartphones. In addition a $200 credit was offered for trade-ins with an additional $50 credit given to anyone buying a Z10 or Q10 BlackBerry smartphone.

The cut-off date for this offer ended on March 5, 2014. So how did things turn out for these two companies? On the one hand we have loyal BlackBerry users up in arms concerning the offer we also have Chen’s blog. On the other hand we have T-Mobile’s offer.

According to a post on TmoNews, as of 9:38pm on March 4 the number was up to 94 percent. This number represents the percentage of users who traded in their BlackBerry devices and switched to a non-BlackBerry platform. As stated in the post, the information was received from an image of an internal memo from one of TmoNews’ sources.

I believe that the internal source read, "The program has been extremely popular, driving at least a 15x increase in BlackBerry trade-ins, with approximately 94 percent of those customers moving to a non-BlackBerry device at upgrade. This promotion was created to provide additional value for our loyal BlackBerry customers while providing customer choice — an important part of being the Un-carrier."

When looking at numbers like this, you have to take into consideration how 94 percent relates to the total number of people that this actually represents. Another thing to keep in mind is that the offer was for BlackBerry devices, not currently connected BlackBerry devices. It is quite possible that current customers with old, no longer used BlackBerry Curves brought the device in for their trade-in.

A recent report from comScore, released in February, shows that the fourth quarter 2013 figures have BlackBerry only capturing a 3.4 percent of the U.S. smartphone market. This represents a drop from third quarter results, as in September BlackBerry had a 3.8 percent share of the market.

In the news posting, T-Mobile also said, "If this is what customers want, this is what customers will get!" It is obvious from the numbers that this is what T-Mobile’s customers want. I suppose that the greater question to ask is if this is what all customers want.

We have seen that BlackBerry has made a lot of changes since John Chen took hold of the reins as BlackBerry’s CEO. Many of these changes do appear to be leading the company in the right direction. I have been saying for the past nine months or so that I believe that BlackBerry’s goal is to rely solely on its software. The work on making some of its software cross-platform products, along with outsourcing the manufacturing of its hardware, seems to bear that out.