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BLACKBERRY HAS ANNOUNCED it agreed to a $4.7 billion (€3.5 billion) buyout by a consortium of investors who plan to take the struggling Canadian smartphone maker private.
The company said in a statement that it has “signed a letter of intent agreement under which a consortium to be led by Fairfax Financial Holdings Limited has offered to acquire the company subject to due diligence.”
Fairfax, a Canadian firm, is already BlackBerry’s largest shareholder with approximately 10 per cent of its shares.
Under the proposed deal the consortium would offer $9 (€6.70) for each outstanding share, and Fairfax would contribute its own shares in the transaction.
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BlackBerry said its board of directors said support the plan.
A firm deal, once due diligence is completed, is expected to be announced by November 4. It hinges also on the consortium obtaining financing.
BlackBerry said it would continue a search for a possibly better suitor in the interim.
On Friday, the company announced it was laying off 40 per cent of its workforce after a dismal launch of new smartphones earlier this year.
I never did invest in a blackberry. I never had that 5 minutes to spare to send a text, or the navigational skills requires to change a setting. Totally unnatural computing…
I imagined Microsoft were eyeing them up. Combine them with Nokia, and you have a great army of hardware engineers …. Combine that with the software expertise and they can bring out a true end to end experience that could compete with apple and the Samsung/android devices.
Just to be clear, I hate blackberry products, and similarly dislike the Nokia ones- but they have some good hardware features (and engineers) as do Nokia. Windows are clawing desperately to find a decent hardware software offering. Seems like a triple win for the right price.
BlackBerry is fooked, so someone pays $4.7B for it. In a couple of years they’ll sell it to someone else for another few billion. The bankers get to keep the coins which stick to the shovel, probably about 100M. Wall Street, man.
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