BlackBerry’s India Managing Director Sunil Dutt resigned

Blackberry India Managing Director Sunil Dutt, who joined the company in December 2011, quit from the company in the month of March 2013 within a month after leading the launch of BlackBerry 10 OS and the Z10 in India.

BlackBerry India spokesperson confirmed the news of his resignation from the position as Managing Director of BlackBerry India with an immediate effect.In the interim, Rick Costanzo, Executive Vice President for Global Sales, will take over the leadership of the talented management team in India .

India is an extremely important market for BlackBerry and aim of company is to continue to build on recent momentum with the launch of BlackBerry 10. BlackBerry’s marketshare in India has been seeing a steady fall, despite strong brand value. Cheap Android smartphones, some selling for less than 5000 rupees offer far more features and especially a rich ecosystem of applications that BlackBerry’s USPs like BBM and e-mail haven’t been able to keep up with.

RIM (Research in motion) had a market share of 4.7 percent and was at the fourth spot behind Nokia, Samsung and Micromax. Cybermedia Research had also reported in the last quarter of 2012 that while Apple shipped 280000 devices in India, BlackBerry only shipped 210,000 units.

BlackBerry sees India as a major market for its products and is already facing diminishing market shares to bear the shake coming their way. BlackBerry is also dealing with the Indian Government’s pressure on providing it the access to the unique PINs of all BlackBerry devices across the world for security reasons. Additionally, the Government has reportedly proposed to take over the monitoring of BlackBerry servers in Mumbai and has threatened BlackBerry to ban its services if it fails to provide the government the access to its data by 31 March 2013.