BlackBerry Sold for $4.7 Billion
Just when you thought BlackBerry might be dead after their weekend from hell, it looks like that a consortium of buyers still see some life in the old girl yet. A group led by BlackBerry’s largest shareholder, Fairfax Financial Holdings, will buy the outstanding shares of BlackBerry in an all-cash deal totaling $4.7 billion.
Fairfax currently owns approximately 10% of the outstanding shares of BlackBerry. The deal calls for Fairfax and its partners to buy the remaining shares of the company in a deal worth about $9 per share.
Trading of BlackBerry shares were halted ahead of the announcement of the purchase. At that point in time, BlackBerry shares had fallen 60 cents during Monday’s training to $8.48. BlackBerry shares opened trading last Friday at $10.82 before the you know what hit the fan.
Despite what you may think about BlackBerry, analysts value the various parts of BlackBerry at more than Fairfax’s purchase price. While analysts at Raymond James have valued the handset portion of the business at $0, the BlackBerry Enterprise infrastructure has been valued at up to $1.2 billion which makes it the most valuable component of the business. The BlackBerry patent portfolio has been pegged at about $1 billion but it has a wide spectrum of estimates of its value. And to top it off, BlackBerry has $2.8 billion in cash.
Talking to other folks with an interest in BlackBerry tend to agree with analyst valuations. The most valuable part of the business is the Enterprise services. Given that governments find BlackBerry’s Enterprise Servers secure enough to transmit data, I’d imagine that there would be a great number of security conscious firms that would like those services. With BB changing focus to the corporate customer, offering these services would be putting their best foot forward.
Posted on September 24, 2013, in Tech and tagged BlackBerry, Business, Fairfax, RIM. Bookmark the permalink. 1 Comment.



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