Hoping to cut off domestic and foreign rivals at the pass, RIM has announced it will be introducing the BlackBerry to China via China Mobile, the country's largest mobile operator, soon. This follows reported pilots using "a few hundred thousand" corporate users.

RIM says it is targeting large multinationals first, which is logical as they are low-hanging fruit. Currently China lacks a substantial home-grown management class of the type that habitually make use of BlackBerry-like devices and applications in other markets, but this group is taking shape. RIM has plenty of room to grow just targeting the obvious global corporates in China, but it will be interesting to see if in doing so it is able to seed the same behavior outside of this first tier of prospects. In other words, will China develop hordes of BlackBerry-addicted professionals as has happened elsewhere?