The Once Mighty BlackBerry Has Been Sold for 4.7B
Breaking news: BlackBerry, the once titan of the business mobile world has just agreed to sell for 4.7B to Fairfax Financial Holdings. The Toronto based Fairfax already owns10% of BB and has locked in at $9 a share which is a 9% premium considering BB was trading at $8.23 before the deal locked in.
Last week BB announced it was cutting 4500 jobs and took a loss of 1B in the second quarter. BBs newest handsets failed to please consumers and pundits and left BB with a very bleak future. BB is another classic case of a company too big locked into a comfort zone that they could not see past. The iPhone blasted on the scene and had mass consumer appeal and had tremendous success. BB however, locked into the business environment never thought that business would shift away and adopt social networking and mobile purchasing as a new frontier like they did. With 2 billion devices estimated to be sold this year, Corporate American is keenly aware of the marketing possibilities that it has and adopting the iPhone is a no brainer. BB, was too late and lacked consumer buying power and was left behind.
Let’s see what the new owners can do with it. Good luck with that.
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I have zero confidence the new buyers will do anything significant with BlackBerry. This deal is an indication BlackBerry saw the end and took whatever they could. They will have a hard time convincing carriers to work with them now that they have gone private and sales of their devices have been so poor.
They are giving Microsoft time to get their enterprise pack for Windows Phone launched and Microsoft has the ability to offer low-cost devices that work well.
It’s a …oh what’s the word? Um, Investment Holdings or whatever. They’ll scrap it for patents, and sell those off. It’s almost certain they have no interest in the business of devices. Bye bye, BB!
Hmmm, possibly not. It seems like this may not be a done deal. If someone else wants in on it, there’ll be a bidding war.
http://money.cnn.com/2013/09/23/technology/mobile/blackberry-private/index.html?hpt=hp_t2
Blackberry really needed a Transformational Leadership and it needed during the last 10 years. Their Co-CEOs were not transformational, their new leader is not transformational. They needed a leader like Yahoo!’s Marissa. Now she is real transformational leader, they needed someone similar there. BB has had the leadership problem from the beginning, and mobile world is not the same as 10 years back. If someone compares BB to Nokia, they are really ignorant. Even though they look same and had lack of transformational leadership for sometime, it started pulling itself together.
And I don’t understand a lot of people say Microsoft should buy BB. Both Nokia and Microsoft have better IP Portfolio than BB. And the Nortel patents that the consortium acquired, which BB also shared with Microsoft, and Apple, the Kodak patents, now Nokia purchase really covers most of the stuff. I think Microsoft knows this. Also buying BB is a distraction to Microsoft and sends confusing message to the market. Just my 2 cents.
It’s a sad story to hear for their down fall. I think BB company need to have a new set of leadership to transform into new a techniques and ideas on how they will run successfully their business.