BlackBerry Announces a Long-Term Licensing Agreement with TCL

You may know of TCL as the company who manufactures Alcatel's smartphones. They've been producing the company's smartphones for a while now and it seems TCL enjoys this type of business relationship. After BlackBerry's popularity declined, it seemed like the company was just going to stop manufacturing smartphones and focus on their enterprise software division instead. Then a new partnership signaled the possibility of new life coming to BlackBerry's smartphone business.

Granted, BlackBerry is not making their own smartphones anymore, but their brand name will live on. We first saw this with the DTEK50, and then again with the DTEK60, as both of these devices were manufactured by TCL. They were rebranded as TCL smartphones and many have been okay with that, since the hardware is nice and BlackBerry excels in software and security, which is what they've been focusing on.

It was unclear exactly how long this relationship would last, but this week it's been announced that the two companies have signed a long-term licensing agreement. This frees up BlackBerry to continue focusing on their enterprise software division, while still maintaining a branding presence in the smartphone market. It will be interesting to see how this relationship develops in the future too, since the DTEK series was the product of a short-term partnership to see how the two companies would work together.

TCL could go the route of simply rebranding their own smartphones with BlackBerry's logo, or they could start to produce unique designs for them. This partnership gives TCL exclusive global manufacturer and distributor rights for all BlackBerry-branded smartphones except in India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh and Indonesia. So we'll continue to see BlackBerry partner with at least one other manufacturer for products sold within these countries.

What do you think of this long-term licensing agreement? Are you looking forward to seeing what new smartphones BlackBerry and TCL release in the future?

Source: Marketwired

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