SMS to open 3 more stores
SMS — Smart Mobile Solutions plans to open three more stores within the next year, as it looks to meet growing demand in the booming smartphone services market.
SMS managing director Dane Spencer told Sunday Finance that the stores will be set up outside of Kingston, where the company’s lone branch is now located on Ruthven Road.
“The expansion is in an effort to make our services more accessible to people in different parishes and in an effort to give people in Jamaica a better retail experience,” said Spencer.
“Kingston is not the only part of Jamaica that is in need of good service, so we have mapped out an expansion plan to leverage our central administration to other parishes as well,” he added.
Spencer said the expansion project will add seven more persons to SMS’s staff complement and “raise the bar” of the retail experience in Jamaica.
“We firstly launched our Smart Phone Super Store concept where we have gone bigger and better with retail, introducing the concept of ‘touch, interact, connect’ where customers can now come to the store and pretty much taste and buy — they are able to use the latest devices and use our WiFi to connect and interact with our well trained staff,” he said, declaring “We are going a step further when we launch our Smart Care plans which will give you more than the limited warranties that are normally offered with device purchases. The Smart Care Plan will go a step further to protect you against accidental damage through select warranty offers.”
SMS, the brainchild of Spencer and friend Marlon Hudson, emerged in 2006 providing solutions to BlackBerry-related needs at a time when the device was relatively new to the local market. Since then, the company has evolved from just distributing BlackBerry accessories to wholesalers and retailers in the Caribbean, to providing a variety of software and smartphone solutions at the business and consumer level.
“We are expanding our product line to the emerging Android platform and have already adapted the Apple market. So our product offering has expanded to no longer just BlackBerry, but we are adapting and growing with the smartphone and tablet markets,” revealed Spencer.
“Not to mention our software solutions department, we are now in a position to tailor solutions to improve business efficiency, with end-to-end solutions that will enable your smartphone to do more than the traditional email messaging and phone calls,” he continued. “Imagine, entering digital forms from your BB or smartphone into a database, and have access to that data in report form or even access the raw data.”
What’s more is that SMS has created tracking solutions for smartphones and is doing more consumer applications to enhance the smartphone user experience. For instance, Spencer said the company released its own BlackBerry Screen lock application, which he said should resolve the “irritating problem faced on the BlackBerry Torch where people’s faces touch the screen and disturb their call”.
Going forward, Spencer said the company will look to diversify its revenue stream outside of its core business related to smartphones.
“Our plans for diversification may probably be where we support more mobile devices, such as mp4 players, GPS modules, laptops, anything related to mobility and solutions. We also currently provide IT services to select clients,” he said.