Something about BlackBerry finally went up for a change -- yesterday, a Fairview apartment dweller, who I always exchange friendly words with, called down to me as I was riding by, and asked if I could toss them the BlackBerry battery they'd dropped. Usually, the BlackBerry phones I see have been relegated to the dumpster, mingled with the leftovers from an unboxed iPhone,
The buzzards are circling
It's dark days indeed for the Waterloo, Ontario Canada-based, not-so-smart phone maker -- few people want the phones, and fewer appear to want the company. The only creditable bid to buy BlackBerry Ltd. is coming from their largest shareholder, Fairfax Holdings Ltd, which holds 10% of the ailing company. The ink is barely dry on reports that a letter of intent had been signed so BlackBerry could sell itself for $4.7 billion USD to a group led by Fairfax. Now new reports say that two of the potential investors in Fairfax's consortium -- two of Canada's largest pension funds -- are only interested in carving out pieces of the fallen tech giant, not in backing the entire company. The Farfax deal is valued at $9 a share, significantly above some analysts' valuation. This Guardian report quotes Michael Genovese, of MKM Partners, as estimating BlackBerry's real value at only $7 a share, with the services division accounting for $5, and the operating system, and intellectual property, each worth only $1.
BlackBerry has now been fighting for it's life almost continually for eight years, since late 2005 when a so-called patent troll named NTP threatened to shut down the phone maker at the height of their success. NTP had demanded about $1 billion USD. Early the next year, BlackBerry agreed to pay $612.5 million USD to the patent holding company. BlackBerry barely had time to catch their breath; the very next year, in 2007, Apple released the first generation iPhone, and, six years later, here we are.