Secure voice communications will be an important criteria going forward for most enterprise customers, and BlackBerry Ltd hopes to achieve enterprise mobile security market domination through its first acquisition since new CEO John Chen was appointed last November.

Waterloo, Ontario-based BlackBerry on Tuesday announced that it is acquiring Secusmart GmbH, a Dusseldorf, Germany-based provider of high-security voice and data encryption and anti-eavesdropping mobile phone software. Secusmart’s customers include government organizations (including German Chancellor Angela Merkel), enterprises and telecommunications service providers in Germany and internationally. The financial terms of the deal were undisclosed and the deal is still subject to regulatory approval.

Through this acquisition, BlackBerry is betting on becoming the leader in secure voice communications, a new market opportunity that currently no other mainstream platform addresses according to Jack E. Gold, President and Principal Analyst at J.Gold Associates, LLC. “This is the real goal behind the Secusmart acquisition—actively promoting a secure voice market where BlackBerry can lead all of its competitors,” Gold wrote on his blog. “If BlackBerry can raise the awareness and get the market, particularly in enterprise and regulated industries, to recognize the need for secure voice communications to protect from potential loss, then BlackBerry could be a big winner.”

Businessweek reported that BlackBerry is seeking to counter declining demand for its smartphones by focusing on supplying software and hardware to customers in regulated industries such as finance, government, health care and law, which have higher standards for security and risk management. “The acquisition of Secusmart underscores our focus on addressing growing security costs and threats ranging from individual privacy to national security,” said John Chen, CEO of BlackBerry, in a statement yesterday.

BlackBerry claims to have within its customer base all G7 governments, 16 of the G20 governments, 10 out of 10 of the largest global enterprises in each of the pharmaceutical, legal and automotive industries, and five of the largest oil and gas companies. The company’s strong expertise in securing phones may continue to give it a competitive edge in those fields—which are governed by stringent security policies and regulations as Computerworld noted.

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Too late: Apple will rule the enterprise

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Unfortunately for BlackBerry, however, the deal between it and Secusmart might have happened much too late to even matter as TechCrunch reported. At one time BlackBerry was the most dominant smartphone in the world but its market share eroded with introduction of the iPhone and later Android phones. BlackBerry’s share of the U.S. enterprise smartphone market plummeted from 40 percent in December 2009 to 2.5 percent in April 2014, according to digital measurement and analytics firm comScore, Inc. Meanwhile, Apple’s surged to 41.4 percent.

Adding insult to injury, Apple earlier this month gave BlackBerry a serious punch by teaming up with enterprise powerhouse IBM in an exclusive partnership aimed at bringing IBM’s Big Data and analytics software to iPhones and iPads used by employees in the enterprise. As part of the deal, Apple will service IBM’s software as well as the iPhones and iPads, while IBM will provide more than 100 industry-specific enterprise software programs created exclusively for iOS, selling Apple’s mobile devices with them.

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