BlackBerry said it has “a pipeline of additional opportunities” when it comes to making the most of its assets in the device space, including “late discussions” for the Indian market.

With the recovering company opting not to participate in the device hardware market any more, having failed to reassert itself in the current smartphone space, it recently announced a deal with TCL, which will offer BlackBerry-branded devices powered by software from the Canadian company.

This deal covers “all the major global markets, including China, so we should benefit from TCL’s global scale,” John Chen, BlackBerry’s CEO said during a conference call.

But there are some geographic omissions from the TCL agreement: India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh and Indonesia. One of these – Indonesia – is covered by an earlier deal.

Indonesia potential
Chen also said that the “first set of phones that will ship from a partner is right around Chinese New Year, a couple weeks later. That’s Indonesia first.”

Indonesia is an interesting market for BlackBerry in that it has 60 million active users of its BBM messaging service, creating a strong base of potential customers for BlackBerry-branded devices.

Chen refused to be drawn on the kind of figures associated with licensing software to device vendors, citing contract confidentially, but noted that “obviously we like the numbers”.