We’ve known for a while that the end was near for Blackberry. Between all the delays with Blackberry 10, and the company really not innovating as much as the rest of the competition. Their market share has slowly dwindled down over the past few years as Android and iOS market share’s have grown tremendously. On Monday, Blackberry (formally RIM) announced that they have entered into a letter of intent with a consortium led by Fairfax Financial to buy out the company for $4.7 Billion, or $9 per share. The CEO of Fairfax, Prem Watsa, is a ormer Blackberry board member, said that the buyout would make Blackberry a private company and would “open an exciting private chapter for Blackberry, it’s customers, carriers and employees.” Blackberry says it expects Fairfax to finish conducting it’s due diligence by November 4th. While the deal is non-binding, Blackberry would have to pay $0.30 to Fairfax if they do decide to back out of the deal.
The board of directors for Blackberry, was acting on the recommendation of a special committee of the board of directors (the “special committee) which approved the terms of the Letter of Intent (LOI) under which the consortium would acquire Blackberry and take the company private.
It’s been a pretty sad year for Blackberry. First they announced Blackberry 10 back in January, and nobody was really all that excited about it. And even less people bought their phones. Then last week they announced that they lost $1 billion in the second quarter of the 2014 fiscal year. Along with another delay in #BBM4all hitting Android and iOS. Of course, they blame that on the leaked version of the app that got out over the weekend. It’s really not looking good for Blackberry. But if they want to become a software company (which they have great enterprise software), they are going to need to make sure their software is bullet-proof, which they didn’t do with BBM, obviously.