“Struggling smartphone maker Blackberry has agreed in principle to be bought by a consortium led by Fairfax Financial for $4.7bn (£3bn),” BBC News reports. “Blackberry said in statement that Fairfax, its largest shareholder with about 10% of the stock, had offered $9 a share in cash to buy the company.”
“On Friday, Blackberry announced 4,500 jobs cuts in a bid to stem losses,” The Beeb reports. “The Canadian company said it expected to make a loss of up to $1bn after poor sales of its new handsets. In August, Blackberry said it was evaluating a possible sale.”
The Beeb reports, “Canadian billionaire Prem Watsa, Fairfax’s chairman and chief executive, said: ‘We believe this transaction will open an exciting new private chapter for Blackberry, its customers, carriers and employees. We can deliver immediate value to shareholders, while we continue the execution of a long-term strategy in a private company with a focus on delivering superior and secure enterprise solutions to Blackberry customers around the world.'”
“Brian Colello, analyst at Morningstar, said that taking Blackberry private would allow the company to reorganise without being under the glare of Wall Street investors,” The Beeb reports. “He said: ‘Based on the company’s disastrous earnings warning on Friday, I think a deal had to happen and the sooner the better. This is probably the only out for investors and the most likely outcome. The benefit to this sort of takeover is the ability for Blackberry and the consortium to reinvent the company without public scrutiny.”
MacDailyNews Take: Yeah, maybe they can sell floor wax or something.
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Like Dell, this is yet another once-high-profile company that Steve Jobs & Co.’s utterly, mercilessly, remorselessly destroyed.
iPhone, killer.
Amateur hour is over.
R.I.P., Blackberry. Dead Company, Walking No More.
Shame Steve couldn’t see this.
I’m sure he saw it. Writing was on the wall for some time now.
R.I.P. R.I.M. You had your day in the sun.
I disagree. I think he would not have cared that much. In the smartphone market, RIM was never enough of a competitor to move Jobs outside his steadfast focus on making great products. RIM was a great phone for email. Smartphones are about a lot more than that and RIM has not yet figured that out. Jobs only really spoke out about actual competitors. RIM never was one.
Wait, someone paid money for Blackberry????
In principal
Something doesn’t smell right; first Blackberry announces a take-private bid from their largest shareholder, Fairfax Financial Holding, who owns about 10 percent of the company’s stock. The question people should ask is that is this buyout bid a serious bid or is it merely a “stalking horse bid” to either obscure another party or create a sense of urgency among strategic players? Hmmmmmm!!!
DCWNM.
I’m surprised Monkey Boy didn’t buy it. He seems in the habit of purchasing loses.
He used up his allowance of 2 or so billion to blow every year… so don’t worry, 2014 will be another 2 or 3 billion before he steps off the stage…. Hopefully the replacement will continue to create ground breaking POS to blow more billions out the door every year! 😉
Given fewer competition in this market, I just hope Apple doesn’t go complacent toward itself as to the point to repeat sucidal blunders like ATV update 6.0 over and over. How many new Apple costumers regretted buying and ATV this bricking week end?
English as a second language.
Look, we all speak Korean as a second or third language around here.
Don’t be shy, tell us this FUD in your own language. We are all listening.
Korean? Blackberry is from Canada. I think you mean French. “Oui, oui, we surrendered yet again, this time in le smartphone business. Ces’t la vie!”
I’m trying everyday to improve my skills on this beautiful language. Sorry for my misspell/misuse of words. And, no. No French, no Korean, no Canadian. Mexican, and I love Apple. But what a horrible ATV update!!
Canadian is not a language you stupid retard. We speak English (and French) up here beyond the 49th. No wonder why the rest of the world hates you guys. Don’t complain when you get another terrorist attack in your country.
He is telling us where he is from not what languages he speaks.
I’m glad most Canadians I’ve known are of a better class.
Looks like you’ve thrown the “kind Canadian” stereotype out the window.
“We can deliver immediate value to shareholders”.
Er…so what about value to the consumers/users? Not too concerned about that are they. Do I smell a patent fire sale on the hearth. I can sense the Goog sifting the ashes now.
What I don’t get is why Fairfax would even want the company. Seems like throwing good money after bad.
It’s a write-off to them 🙂
Lee Majors returns as The $4.7 Billion Turd!
Maybe make jam.
Using words like “merciless”…”destroyed” etc is really a great disservice to Apple and all that it stands for.
SJ and Apple weren’t out to destroy Blackberry. Apple simply created a great product. Market forces moved accordingly.
Aw, c’mon, don’t deny us our fun! We just enjoy seeing those who belittled the iPhone in 2007 get their final comeuppance!
——RM
No matter how sweet in the moment…revenge always has a very bitter taste in the end. Learned that lesson a long time ago. 🙁
You’re right of course, but don’t expect maturity on the internet!
Look at the only one surviving Billions and Billions of dollars in loses for failed products. That is why one company with a monopoly has an unfair advantage over rivals… RIM didn’t have one and relied on a one trick pony, never bothered to innovate it for years. Along comes Apple, rather than hunkering down and getting to work, the two CEO arrogantly dismissed Apple products as fairytales and ridiculed Apple and the products. RIM has no one to blame but the cocky CEO’s.
Before the iPhone, there was Blackberry. I loved my Blackberry. It’s a shame. Wall St. is to blame for there myopia too because they push for the easy money for today and punish anything that isn’t of short term value. They try and do that to Apple too and everyone else, but it’s up to the CEO’s to take the heat, instead of playing with numbers to jig up the stock prices solely for their bonuses.
I neve thought of Blackberries as smartphones. In my opinion, they were email phones. They didn’t do anything else well.
Fairfax is an insurance company out to make a profit on this “transaction”. They very well might, there are still enough IT doofuses out there that will say “carry this thing it is best”.
My solution to this problem was that when I was presented with a request many years ago (well before the iPhone) to carry a Blackberry by my employer was “take your pick- 1) I’m leaving that thing on my desk at. 5pm or 2) you are paying me by the hour for every minute that thing is in my car or house. ” Needless to say, my fingers have never touched a blackberry. (And many of my coworkers said the same thing and a company wide roll out was canceled AND we got cell phone subsidies- I used mine for a RAZOR and then a 3G.)
I don’t get all the hate against Blackberry. True, they had a badly managed company, but if they had better CEOs, then maybe their company would have been more successful. At least they weren’t slavish copiers like Samsung or Google. I thought the Apple community was better than this. At least show some sympathy because Apple was almost in their same situation.
Did you not pay attention on how BB/CEO/TEAM ridiculed Apple? I guess not.
Actually, I take that back. I forgot about what the BB CEOs said. Pure hubris. I just looked that up like minutes ago. But still, these same companies also mocked Android when it was released in Fall 2008. I read somewhere that Steve Jobs did not consider Android a threat, at the time it was released. I’m a big Apple fan, but we should be careful with how we go about this. I don’t want Apple to suffer the same fate.
You’re trying to be convincing but you’re simply here to troll.
I agree. Despite some of the dumb things Lazaridis and/or Balsillie have said in the past, I don’t see a reason to relish in RIMM’s demise.
On the other hand, it was fun to see Dell go down and I can’t wait to see Samsung go down.
6 years too late to capitalize on anything at RIM/BB.
It is as if Google and Apple and others aren’t doing products for secure email.
I do understand that Fairfax with 10% of BB stands a chance for a better return buy buying now rather than wait and see. Fairfax’s option exists just because they are already holding a losing position and a buyout might let them break even at today’s asset value on the books in the worst case.
Now if we could just get governments to stop buying Blackberries. The complacency was that the government contracts were the bread and butter for Blackberry, with special job positions for managing the units in different agencies. Why innovate if government was going to blindly purchase anything you produced? They cost too much to return and government became an easy sell…
Heh. Looks like those Canadian can’t even get tech right! They already ruined music by giving us Justin Bieber, Nickelback, and Celine Dion. Apple finally got rid of these Canadian wannabes. America does it better. Remember that the next time you guys up north try to compete with the absolute best down south.
Well…that was pretty ugly. Denigrating an entire country for the mistakes of a few execs at one company (or music that you don’t happen to like) seems pretty harsh and uncalled for. As an American I’m pretty happy with our cousins to the north (and Rush and Neil Young for that matter).
Wow. That escalated quickly.
This was also another company who said Apple would have no chance in the cell phone market and Apple would be the big loser. We’ll I guess like Dell they found out the hard way that Apple is way better then they had any idea about.
I hope QNX is not affected in any way. That actually is a solid OS.
I M glad that this Illuminati puppet organization is gone for good. Did you know that the BBM messenger service actually was used for gaining private info, and sending it to special interest groups for “customer validation”? I call BS on all of that. That I for was used to pick at random, certain people for the MK Ultra brainwashing program, which the former RIM company used extensively.
I love it when superior technology knocks aside bad technology.
However, I am very say to see BlackBerry die the death. They accomplished quite a lot within the first years of their existence and really did set the trend for awhile. I’d much rather have BlackBerry as competitors with Apple, real competitors, than sold off as trash. I hope the inventive minds over there find new sources of expression and creation. We’re not talking about a bunch of Google, Microsoft, LC, HTC, Nokia or Samsung copy machine droids in the R&D building. These were creative people. I’d rather have seen any of the above named 6 companies in the grave today than BlackBerry. 🙁 😥
Please read: “I am very SAD to see…”
Can’t believe anyone paid so much for broken Crackberry
I hope the co-CEO’s lose their asses in this sale.
It’s not the end but a new beginning for them and the best part they can have a future plan without the public or other smartphone makers knowing as they already go private. Silent killer…..
Yes, because the REAL problem that RIM (and Dell) had was that they were publicly owned!
All should be better now.