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

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: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: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:This is a great landscape for Blackberry.

[TheSpoom]

The truth has no place in marketing.

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.

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.