BlackBerry Z10 helped smartphone pioneer recapture Canadian marketshare

Smartphone pioneer BlackBerry has managed to grow its marketshare in its home market of Canada to 13.5% during the first quarter of 2013, according to a note to investors by Raymond James analyst Tavis McCourt.

However, Barron’s reports the smartphone pioneer still has a long way to go to recapture its former market position.

“The launch of the BlackBerry Z10 in 1Q13 finally reversed Blackberry’s share slide, jumping from 6% in 4Q12 to 13.5% this quarter,” McCourt wrote.

“For some context, two years ago in 1Q11, BlackBerry had 21.8% share. Even more share gains are expected in 2Q13 with the launch of the QWERTY-keyboard Q10 in Canada.

“Following the strong iPhone 5 launch, which lead to 44% share in 4Q13, Apple’s share dropped to 40.1% in 1Q13. Samsung held tightly to its number two position despite its share declining slightly to 29.8% from 32.1% in 4Q12.”

The news reinforces the comments by BlackBerry chief executive Thorsten Heins made in February about the BlackBerry Z10 experiencing the company’s strongest ever launch in the UK and Canada.

“In Canada, yesterday was the best day ever for the first day of a launch of a new BlackBerry smartphone. In fact, it was more than 50% better than any other launch day in our history in Canada,” Heins says.

“In the UK, we have seen close to three times our best performance ever for the first week of sales for a BlackBerry smartphone.”

While Canada had been a stronghold for BlackBerry, IDC figures released in March of last year showed that Apple had overtaken it during 2011, with Apple shipping 2.85 million units compared to 2.08 million BlackBerry shipments in Canada.