BlackBerry Abandons Sale Plans, Will Replace CEO

An anonymous reader writes "BlackBerry has abandoned plans to sell the company to Fairfax Holdings after the shareholder could not raise enough money. CEO Thorsten Heins is to leave the company. From the article: 'The company also said that Prem Watsa, chairman and CEO of Fairfax, will be appointed Lead Director and chair of the compensation, nomination and governance committee. Mr. Watsa had resigned from the BlackBerry board earlier this year to explore a bid for the company.'"

Comments

Slashdot Abandons Grammar Will Use Runon Sentences

[Anonymous Coward]

nt

semicolon

[noh8rz10]

semicolons are awesome! especially in headlines. The Onion does it well.

Re:semicolon

[UnknowingFool]

I believe that in this case a comma should be used but my Grammar German is rusty. :)

Re:semicolon

[slashmydots]

This is an Onion article apparently. I read it as BlackBerry Abandons Sale Plans Will Replace CEO. They're making an ultra smart phone called The Abandons which is smart enough to replace their CEO so it's going to.

Re:semicolon

[slashmydots]

Now that's interesting, I added certain custom punctuation and the comment system stripped it out without telling me. Maybe Slashdot doesn't support proper punctuation.

Re:Sale doesn't solve problem, Shifts it to new ow

[alexander_686]

Maybe. They are pumping a billion dollars into the company. Less than the 2 to 3 billion the buyout would have pumped in but still a large amount.
Then thing about fight or flight.

Selling stock is like voting with your feet. That’s fleeing.

Buy the company and changing the management. That’s fighting. Not a choice for many small investors. The new management might have some brilliant ideas. Or maybe they will just shut down the company and sell the company in chunks. I understand it has a lot of patents.

FTFS vs. FTFA

[HairyNevus]

Summary: "BlackBerry has abandoned plans to sell the company to Fairfax Holdings after the shareholder could not raise enough money."

Article: "In an interview, Mr. Watsa denied reports that Fairfax struggled to raise financing for the $4.7 billion deal. 'Over the history of Fairfax, we've never had a problem lining up financing,' he said. 'There was no question of us being able to raise money. After the due diligence period we didn't think was appropriate for [BlackBerry] to be burdened with debt.'"

Maybe the AC knows something it's not sharing?

Re:FTFS vs. FTFA

[denis-The-menace]

IMO, Prem Watsa is just engineering the price of the stock down while freezing out other potential suitors with that "pays us 30cents/share if you sell to another" clause.

Friday BBRY was at $7.77. Watsa's offer *was* to buy it at $9.00. Today he says "he changed his mind" and then 9:30am, *someone* bought 2.5% of BBRY for $6.46. And tomorrow morning it will happen again. (just watch)

Watsa's Fairfax company is one of those predatory company that buys struggling companies, chops them up and sells the parts for more than the company was worth as a whole.

Mark my words: He will buy BBRY sooner or later and spin off BBM at a price that will cover the purchase price of BBRY as a whole.

Re:FTFS vs. FTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

BBM isn't worth X billion. Not anymore. It was before iMessage became ubiquitous for a huge % of smart phone numbers, before WhatsApp became the new BBM, before Google Talk made SMS free for countless others. BBM isn't valuable, nobody is going to pay for the service, it isn't worth X billions in ad impressions.

Re:This is a great landscape for Blackberry.

[Anonymous Coward]

this is the same company that let the indian and other asian governments have access to customers' data

Good news, bad news for BB

[Minwee]

It looks like Fairfax wasn't able to come up with a DVD full of dollars ($4,700,372,992) to buy the company, but fortunately Blackberry was able to sell the CEO to an unnamed bidder for one billion.

(By the way, Thorsten? Just thought you should know. It's a cook book. Enjoy your trip.)

Re:Sale doesn't solve problem, Shifts it to new ow

[Maury Markowitz]

"They are pumping a billion dollars into the company. Less than the 2 to 3 billion the buyout would have pumped in but still a large amount."

Apple made 10 billion in deferred profits last quarter. DEFERRED profits.

A billion is *not* enough.

Welcome to the farce!

[Chas]

RIMJobber1: What's that flushing sound?
RIMJobber2: Why's there swirly blue water all over the place?
RIM: RUH ROH RAGGY!

Re:This is a great landscape for Blackberry.

[TheSpoom]

The truth has no place in marketing.

Re:The Trove

[Dzimas]

Agreed. Watsa has a good idea what the patent portfolio is worth, and my suspicion is that he's playing a shrewd game. There are only two scenarios: (1) Blackberry pulls a rabbit out of the hat and manages to scratch out a profit as a minor player in the smartphone game, or (2) Blackberry's hardware business collapses and Watsa manages to get his hands on the company's patent portfolio as a discount.

Re:This is a great landscape for Blackberry.

[ArhcAngel]

this is the same company that let the indian and other asian governments have access to customers' data

This is the only company that fought (for years) to prevent such access. You only heard about it because they fought it. All the other companies complied. And the way they designed the BES not even they can grant India access to that data. But don't let facts get in the way of bashing a company that went to bat for your rights to privacy.

I think everyone in Canada...

[FilmedInNoir]

should get a chance to be CEO of BlackBerry

Re: Blackberry's back!

[rtb61]

Don't forget Apple had to get all the way down there first and Blackberry still has a ways to go down yet. For all the winners there are losers Epson ( and I ain't talking salt), Palm (no oil there now), Wang (gone all limp now), Gateway (to no where), Apricot (just not fruity enough), Commodore (no ship to sail), to name just a very few. Most crash very very few rebound.