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Now Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd is doing the same, announcing on Monday new software that will store corporate apps and data in an encrypted container separate from the rest of the device’s operating system.

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“It’s tough to get into the market as you’ve got a lot of competition and there are a lot of compliance and logistics issues,” said Larry Berlin, an analyst at First Analysis Corp. in Chicago. “Could it be the right play if people like the phones? Yeah, but it’s not going to be easy.”

Bianto Surodjo, head of electronic channels at the Jakarta- based bank, said he believes BBM Money will have “a few hundred thousand” users at Permata within 12 months. The application is designed to be as simple as repaying a friend for lunch if she picks up the tab, he said.

“If they want to do the payment, they just go into BBM Money and they transfer in a simple way as if they were chatting,” he said yesterday in a telephone interview from Jakarta. “We want to put financial activities into customers’ habits because BlackBerry Messenger is becoming like the culture here for people to communicate.”

Losing Subscribers

The number of BlackBerry subscribers worldwide dropped from 80 million to 79 million at the end of last quarter, after a decade of steady growth, as sales fell 47% from a year earlier. The company doesn’t provide figures for its Indonesian subscriber base.

There are more than 60 million BBM customers worldwide, meaning about about three out of every four BlackBerry subscribers, use its free instant-messaging service, which allows users to see when the recipient has read a message.