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anadian-based smartphone manufacturer BlackBerry Ltd. plans to heavily monetize its application services amid declining sales of its devices, with Indonesia becoming one of its most important consumer markets.

BlackBerry senior vice president for emerging enterprise sales, Matthew Talbot, said on Thursday that his firm was monetizing its services by partnering with advertisers from both brick-and-mortar retailers and e-commerce players.

'€œThere'€™s a good opportunity to bring more and more merchants to the table as there is a large volume of retailers that are emerging in Indonesia,'€ he said, adding that Indonesia was the second fastest growing e-commerce market after China.

Indonesia'€™s e-commerce has been growing exponentially through the years, supported by higher Internet penetration in the country that will reach 55 percent in 2017, according to financial services company UBS.

The country'€™s e-commerce market is forecast to grow to US$25 billion next year, up from around $8 billion in 2013, according to e-commerce provider Vela Asia.

E-commerce marketplaces Qoo10, Tokopedia and Elevenia were among those that advertised through BlackBerry'€™s virtual shop as well as using BlackBerry'€™s e-money application dubbed BlackBerry Messenger Money (BBM Money), Talbot said.

Globally, BlackBerry recorded an average of 400 million advertisement requests per day in January, a surge from 300 million in December last year, he went on.

Talbot told The Jakarta Post that the monetization of BBM in the country had a bright outlook as it had a captive audience that continued to grow organically in the market.

While the firm'€™s share in the country'€™s smartphone market has been eroded by its global peers '€” such as Apple, Samsung and LG '€” its BBM application remained the most popular messaging application in the country. According to a Nielsen'€™s report published last year, almost 80 percent of the country'€™s smartphone users use BBM for about 23 minutes a day on their devices.

The figure is far higher compared to figures for WhatsApp and LINE, which netted 57 and 30 percent of smartphone users, with time spent on the chat applications at six and five minutes a day, respectively.

BBM, which is now available across operating systems, posted more than 140 million new registrations on iPhone and Android-based smartphones last year, according to BlackBerry'€™s internal data.

Talbot said BlackBerry'€™s decision to make its BBM available across operating systems helped the company further monetize the service as it could leverage on a bigger number of users.

BlackBerry'€™s global revenues, however, declined to $793 million in its third-quarter period in November last year from $916 million in its second-quarter period, the firm'€™s third quarter financial report stated.

According to the report, approximately 1.9 million BlackBerry smartphones were sold worldwide during the third quarter.

The company, which once turned the country into a '€œBlackBerry nation'€, saw its shipment share slump to only 2 percent last year from 43 percent in 2011, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC).

IDC stated that Android-based smartphones accounted for 95 percent of a total of 25 million smartphones shipped into Indonesia last year.