We may see a lot of action surrounding BlackBerry over the next 60 days while Fairfax Financial conducts its due diligence and while BlackBerry seeks out alternate bids. One particularly interesting thing to watch will be if the Fairfax offer draws any outside interest from companies who are interested in BlackBerry’s patent portfolio, which has an estimated worth of between $2 billion to $3 billion. Chris Marlett, CEO of IP-focused investment bank MDB Capital Group, tells CNN that BlackBerry’s patent portfolio could draw substantial interest because it’s the last major treasure trove of mobile patents that hasn’t been gobbled up by the larger players in the smartphone market. More →
A picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes a chart can be even more valuable. As a new chapter in the book of BlackBerry begins to unfold with a possible buyout looming, The Washington Post republished a comScore chart that does a great job of illustrating BlackBerry’s rise to dominance in the U.S. smartphone market. It also shows us how unbelievably quickly the company’s U.S. market share evaporated as Android and iOS grew to take over the country. The only thing more frightening about the chart, perhaps, is the fact that Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform is even worse off than BlackBerry. ComScore’s chart takes us through March 2013, but the picture certainly hasn’t improved since then — according to the market research firm’s latest data, BlackBerry’s U.S. smartphone market share fell to 4.3% in the three-month period ended in July while Windows Phone stayed flat at 3%. More →
Despite the recent news that BlackBerry may have finally found a buyer if the Fairfax deal doesn’t fall apart, the company’s future as a smartphone vendor is still in jeopardy. The company’s global subscriber base had been holding up as users waited to see what BlackBerry 10 would offer. Since the new platform’s launch, however, BlackBerry has been hemorrhaging users and its worldwide count fell to 72 million from 76 million during the May quarter. According to one industry watcher, the bleeding won’t stop until BlackBerry’s subscriber base hits zero. More →
Although Fairfax Financial is offering to pay $4.7 billion to acquire BlackBerry and take the company private, it’s still giving the BlackBerry board of directors some time to shop around for better offers. The chances of BlackBerry scoring a deal better than the one Fairfax is offering seem decidedly slim at the moment, however. Per Barron’s, Citigroup analyst Jim Suva writes that Fairfax likely went public with its buyout proposal to spur other bids in the company, an event that he describes as “unlikely.” What’s more, Suva thinks that Fairfax may have difficulty raising the capital it needs to buy BlackBerry because “the severity of [BlackBerry's] business fundamentals deterioration poses a real risk in this transaction.”
Yes, 2013 has been a hellish ordeal for BlackBerry. The saga may soon be over if the $4.7 billion Fairfax deal happens, but in the meantime there was finally a ray of light this weekend as the BBM blog announced an unofficial leak of BlackBerry Messenger for Android received an impressive 1.1 million downloads in just eight hours. This leak triggered a delay for the release of the official version, which messed up the plans to get BBM for Android out by Sunday… because it wouldn’t be BlackBerry without some kind of launch disaster. But hitting 1.1 million downloads for the Android app is a real feat, no matter how you slice it. More →
When it rains it pours for BlackBerry. Although there has been considerable interest in the new cross-platform version of BlackBerry Messenger, BlackBerry announced on Monday that the launch of BBM for iOS and Android has been delayed for at least another week. BlackBerry’s BBM chief Andrew Bocking said in a company blog post that the delay happened after “an unreleased, older version of the BBM for Android app was posted on numerous file sharing sites,” which “resulted in volumes of data traffic orders of magnitude higher than normal for each active user and impacted the system in abnormal ways.” The BBM team is now working to completely block the leaked versions of BBM from accessing BlackBerry’s servers before it launches the final version of the app. Bocking said that the fix isn’t expected to occur this week.
BlackBerry’s fate is coming into focus. The company announced on Monday that it has signed a letter of intent with a consortium led by Fairfax Financial to buy out the company for about $4.7 billion, or $9 per share. Fairfax CEO Prem Watsa, a former BlackBerry board member, said that the buyout would make BlackBerry a private company and would “open an exciting new private chapter for BlackBerry, its customers, carriers and employees.” BlackBerry says it expects Fairfax to finish conducting its due diligence by November 4th. Even though the deal is non-binding at this point, BlackBerry will still have to pay Fairfax a fee of $0.30 per share if the deal doesn’t happen. BlackBerry shares jumped about 3% on on the news. The company’s full press release follows below.
I don’t think I have the words for this, but here we go… Thanks to a close source of ours, we have received pictures and information about one of BlackBerry’s upcoming lower cost handsets, codenamed Kopi. We’re told that this model is set to come in at an even lower price than the BlackBerry Q5, and will feature a faster processor to boot. It won’t have LTE, though it will have a removable battery! Look at it — a Palm Pixi crossbred with a Q5 and it’s not exactly going to win any style awards. More →
Time is running out for BlackBerry. The company announced on Friday that it is cutting 4,500 jobs and that it will report a net operating loss of nearly $1 billion in its next quarterly earnings report. The company also braced investors for a major quarterly revenue miss and said its preliminary earnings results show that it generated $1.6 billion in sales on the quarter, or nearly half of Wall Street expectations of $3.06 billion. The company only sold around 3.7 million smartphones on the quarter, a huge drop from the 6.8 million smartphones it sold in the previous quarter. More →
Even though BlackBerry just announced its Z30 flagship phablet on Wednesday, the company apparently has big plans for drastically reducing its staff in the near future. Unnamed sources tell The Wall Street Journal that BlackBerry is planning to slash its workforce by as much as 40% by the end of the year with layoffs that ”will cut across all departments and will occur in waves.” News of massive layoffs, while grim, isn’t very surprising since BlackBerry’s board of directors is trying to find a buyer for the troubled company by November. BlackBerry director Bert Nordberg also recently said that the company was likely to sell off several parts to become a smaller niche player, which means that it won’t need nearly as many employees going forward.
The crowded cross-platform messaging space is about to get a bit more crowded. Industry watchers have repeatedly said that BlackBerry’s efforts to bring BBM to Android and iOS are far too little, too late to matter now that a handful of behemoths dominate the space. While that may or may not be true, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is definitely a healthy amount of buzz surrounding the imminent release of BlackBerry’s famous messaging service on Google and Apple’s mobile platforms. And now, we have some potential good news for those eager to try out the new app — according to a new report, BBM will launch for both Android and iOS later this week. More →
BlackBerry on Wednesday finally took the wraps off of the last new BlackBerry 10 phone expected to debut in 2013. BGR exclusively published the first ever photo of the BlackBerry Z30, then thought to be called the A10, so the handset shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. The fact that it’s yet another high-end phone from BlackBerry without an entry-level offering in sight is still a bit surprising though, even though we already knew that as well. Key BlackBerry Z30 specs include a 5-inch Super AMOLED display, a 1.7GHz quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro processor, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, microSDXC support, an 8-megapixel camera and the new BlackBerry 10.2 operating system. The Z30 will begin rolling out globally in mid-October and a U.S. launch will take place ahead of the holidays. Pricing has not yet been announced. A video showcasing the Z30 follows below along with the full press release. More →