“The saga of BlackBerry Inc. continued to draw attention from investors Monday, as the troubled smartphone company called off plans to sell itself and replaced Chief Executive Thorsten Heins,” Rex Crum reports for MarketWatch. “BlackBerry shares plunged more than 17%, to $6.46 in afternoon trading, after the company said a deal to sell itself to a major shareholder, Fairfax Financial Holdings, had fallen through.”
“Instead, BlackBerry said it will sell $1 billion worth of convertible bonds to Fairfax,” Crum reports. “BlackBerry also said it has replaced Heins as CEO with former Sybase CEO John Chen.”
“Fairfax had until Monday to finalize the financing of a $4.7 billion deal to acquire BlackBerry,” Crum reports. “No other bidders stepped up with a counteroffer for the Canadian smartphone company.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Heins failed his only mission, to sell off the corpse.
So, Thorsty, who’s old news, now? (smirk)
Maybe Chen can figure out how to bury the Apple roadkill once and for all.
Related articles:
Apple should buy BlackBerry and sell lower-priced iOS-powered phones and tablets under the BlackBerry brand – November 4, 2013
Apple recruits employees from beleaguered BlackBerry – October 10, 2013
Beleaguered BlackBerry hit with shareholder class action lawsuit for misrepresenting state of company – October 5, 2013
Beleaguered Blackberry reports $965 million second quarter loss – September 27, 2013
T-Mobile USA stops stocking beleaguered BlackBerry’s phones – September 26, 2013
Amateur hour is over: Beleaguered BlackBerry sold to Fairfax Financial-led consortium – September 23, 2013
Beleaguered BlackBerry’s CEO calls Apple’s iPhone old news – March 18, 2013
Why is it, zombies don’t die… Will BB infect any others? Maybe they need a machete to head. BB isn’t worth $1 billion to invest in. I think this is wasted money.
Hey, if Blackberry needs a new CEO, maybe Stephen Elop is available? He did wonders for Nokia!
He did a HELL of a lot more for Nokia than the last few BB CEOs combined (including the wonder twins). Nokia was able to sell off its smartphone business. BB is about to faceplant into the cement.
Well he was able to sell it (with an estimated 9 month life expectancy as was) simply becasue Microsoft had little choice did they if they wanted to stay in the mobile business. The difference is that Microsoft had their OS at stake whereas BB has their own at stake so no one is actually forced to bail them out. I guess in that regard the best decision Elop made was to go Win mobile route to force the hand that fed it.
If BB can hold out just a little longer, Steve Ballmer will be available!
May RIM RIP
And then, at last, their failure will be complete.
I suspect the new CEO John Chen is in it for a quick Golden Parachute buck. Where can I sign up to run a doomed company? The money is good, REAL good.
This kind of roadkill is where it’s been run over a couple of dozen times and now becoming part of the asphalt.
@ russ
johnathan winters called such a cadaver a ‘sail cat.’ you scrape it off the pavement, grab it by the tail sling it like a frisbee.
The downfall of BB started the day the iPhone was announced. They were once the pioneer of the smartphone with an enormous presence in the corporate market making oodles of money.
Their downfall , like many others was to blindly believe that they had the best most entrenched product and they didn’t need to watch their competitors are up to.
They ignored the padrigam shift when Apple released the iPhone. They thought they had a stranglehold on the busiines market and corps would never go with a device that didn’t have a keyboard – just like Balmer thought and look how that has worked for MS.
When the iPhone came out I had a BB that was the worst phone I have ever had to put up with. The only thing it was good at was email which was more annoying than useful. Even it’s function as a phone totally sucked.
BB had died (come on, the fat lady has sung) because their products were terrible.
Since that day, Blackberry has been a deer frozen in the iPhones’s headlights.
Yup. I tried to assist a few customers with setting up their Blackberries. At the time, I honestly had zero experience with them but was totally shocked at how terrible the experience was navigating around the device. And yet these people considered that to be “normal”. Blackberry karma.
Mr. Heins failure to find a buyer for Blackberry still netted him a $55 million severance when as he left the building. Not a bad deal for him.
Actually the $55M was only if he sold the company and got ousted.
Since he’s being ousted *without* selling the company, he gets “only” $22M or so.
Damn, I had a paper route once for 2 years, and I increased my profits.
Maybe I can be CEO for a year and I’ll only do it for $4 Million.
Wow. I can’t quite remember how low Apple was before SJ return. I think around $7 ? Was it lower?
That sounds about right. I jumped in at 20 and could kick myself for not getting it at 10 on the way up.
IIRC, Apple bottomed out around a $4B or so market cap. I know they were trading for less than the value of their real estate.
-jcr
Amateur hour is, indeed, over.
That could be the only way out…
I really wish Blackberry (RIM) had the common sense to survive. But they’ve been relegated to a corner of the room that nobody wants to be in. It was a failing of their leadership. And there’s only so many “choices” that consumers need. Too many choices and things begin to get messy.