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Rumor: Lenovo In Talks To Buy BlackBerry
BarbaraHudson writes: The CBC, the Financial Post, and The Toronto Sun are all reporting a possible sale of BlackBerry to Lenovo. From the Sun: "BlackBerry shares rose more than 3% on Monday after a news website said Chinese computer maker Lenovo Group might offer to buy the Canadian technology company. Rumors of a Lenovo bid for BlackBerry have swirled many times over the last two years. Senior Lenovo executives at different times have indicated an interest in BlackBerry as a means to strengthen their own handset business. The speculation reached a crescendo in the fall of 2013, when BlackBerry was exploring strategic alternatives. Sources familiar with the situation however, told Reuters last year that the Canadian government had strongly hinted to BlackBerry that any sale to Lenovo would not win the necessary regulatory approvals due to security concerns. Analysts also have said any sale to Lenovo would face regulatory obstacles, but they have suggested that a sale of just BlackBerry's handset business and not its core network infrastructure might just pass muster with regulators."
Regulators looks at purcahse from a chineese company as suspect for security reasons, but when espionage is done by the US, there is no problem.
They will add the little red mouse pointer nub to the middle of the blackberry keyboard. Progress at last!
No financial companies will keep the service if a chinese company buys it (who else uses it now?) Lenovo will be essentially buying their intellectual property.
Blackberry lives on only in the market of security conscious business and government. Once sold to the Chinese, no one will buy. It's fun when there are no trustworthy options for the mass market (Blackphone excluded). I wonder what phone Obama will get if they take over Blackberry.
Over 100 car companies disappeared by WWII.
Now in 2014 a half dozen former "cell phone" makers have sort of slipped out of sight; Palm, BB, Moto, Win, Nokia, Dell & HP something.
The world contracts to a few super usable designs but instead of taking 50 years for cars, now it took only about 5 years with "the smartphone."
Is this the scenario for the future; Be right, Be first, Be best or else?
Not sure how many people here have used Lenovo phones, because I dont think any US carriers have them... But I had one on a BYOP deal for a while and it was a great phone. There seem to be very limitted choices for more rugged phones and the Lenovo I had was pretty much water proof, shock proof, and I got it for $200.
Back when I had a blackberry it was similarly rugged, though not waterproof. I could see this being a good thing. I could see a market for a Blackberry shaped android phone, that was tough and maybe came with some phone management enterprise software. Most of the enterprise software I've used from Android has been terrible.
I don't see any other reason they would want them. Didn't Blackberry already shed all their manufacturing capacity (and this is a Chinese company we're talking about, that would be like trying to sell bread to a baker).
The best part is that if your phone is somehow damaged, a Chinese intelligence agent will sneak in and replace it for you, free of charge.
Blackberry is rumoured to consider selling their handset division
So, Blackberry, after changing their name to Blackberry would no longer be making or selling... Blackberrys.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
As a Chinese, I am quite familari with Lenovo, lenovo phones, lenovo computers, a reliable Chinese supplier. For BlackBerry, I am not farmilar with this brand, and in my heart, foreign brand can not let me be at ease. But that not mean foreigh brand is poor, it is just a local person's thinking.
Yeah, it's for Hal in Sales. It's his retirement gift. What? The whole company? You've gotta be kidding me. Why?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Don't worry because Blackerry is known for their very high quality phones. They are mostly for business and not entertainment, and that is why they became less popular over the years. Nobody does a better job with messaging and security. Lenovo would be lucky if they are allowed to buy them.
????
phone of choice for certain government and corporate users (such as pres. obama), once the chinese get their grubby red paws on the company.
The Chinese have so much productive capacity that they managed to accumulate gigantic piles of cash that came from the West and obviously they can't do anything with it except buy Western businesses. This is accelerating as expected as the Chinese are trying to get rid of their foreign cash reserves in exchange for solid assets. Soon enough the equation will balance itself out, when the Chinese have all the productive assets (real capital) and the rest of the world will be supplying cheap labour.
You can't handle the truth.
I don't understand the hatred. All I can think is that it's anti-Chinese bigotry.
I've had ZERO problems with my Lenovo laptop, and it is one of the cheapest i7 models they make. It's a year and a half old at this point.
The HP I used to have, on the other hand, was a total lemon. Within six months the wifi blew out so the motherboard blew out. Nine months later it blew out again but was no longer under warranty, so it had no wifi. By 18 months old, the hard drive had failed.
No matter what brand you buy, the odds are it's "Made in China" from the cheapest parts the vendor could source. So who cares whether the brand is Chinese, European, UK, Canadian, Australian, African, or American owned save for racist bigots?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
That was blackberry's biggest mistake. When it was blatantly obvious that their device market share was doomed, they could have swooped in and provided trusted enterprise platform atop the other platforms. Instead they stubbornly ignored that potential and doubled down on fighting back with dubious 'consumer' product, and failed.
So in the handset space, Lenovo can focus more on the efforts like BBM for other platforms. This could be a challenge since by the time Blackberry started responding, other credible competitors have seeped in (Microsoft, IBM, et al).
There is of course another interesting asset. Blackberry owns QNX, and QNX actually has a notable chunk of automotive.
Of course the rumor suggests a price in the neighborhood of 7.5 billion. That would be ludicrous for these options. They paid 1 billion for IBM's PC, 2 billion for IBM's x86 servers, and about 3 billion for motorola. It's hard to imagine enough perceived opportunity in Blackberry to be worth more than all of Lenovo's other acquisitions combined.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
If the U.S. government will step in and prevent the sale. After all gov't here LOVES their Blackberry devices. And it wouldn't do to have the Chicom government exercising control over the construction of the phones - who knows what could slip in?
The Canadian government has already said they will not allow the sale of BB to the Chinese.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Blackberry acquired QNX Realtime Operating as part of its process to try and become relevant. Although their handset business is going down the tubes - QNX is still in use in millions of cars worldwide and is in fact a dominant player in that market. Do we really want the Chinese to own the brains behind a large share of world vehicles, as well as owning and making everything else?
Let's face it. They are not after the Blackberry here.
Most of us have moved onto Androids and iPhones, but the few people still using Blackberries are doing so because they offer security the other 2 don't. Part of that security is that it is sold by a Canadian company and Canada has had a pretty good reputation for respecting privacy and security. China has an extremely well deserved reputation of being espionage happy, this wouldn't go over well with those customers.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
Right now its a scam company drawing in all the *security conscious* businessmen and politicos.
I find it nothing short of bizarre that people actually believe that their BB encrypted service is somehow exempt from the law, and the long arm of the five-eyes' three-letter agencies.
Once sold to the chinese, I WILL consider buying.
is BB still a *commodity* in the IT sector? Shouldn't have gone extinct long before Nokia?
Lenovo laptops suck. For some obscure reason a lot of the companies I have worked for used Lenovo laptops.
Shitty battery life and shitty performance.
So buying Blackberry would be a good move to bolster their shitty handset business (with another shitty handset business).
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.