Struggling BlackBerry’s biggest shareholder has reportedly made a number of approaches to large Canadian investment funds to investigate the possibility of a buyout.
Fairfax Holdings has a ten percent stake in BlackBerry, which announced last month it was considering putting itself up for sale as it investigated the company’s future options.
A committee has been set up to discuss these alternatives, but Fairfax CEO Prem Watsa left the BlackBerry board to avoid any possible conflict of interest.
In any case, Fairfax’s alleged interest has improved BlackBerry’s share price and the firm is now valued at $6 billion. It had been suggested that BlackBerry’s patent catalogue alone could be worth as much as $5 billion if it was sold to one party.
However the recent trend towards consortiums purchasing patent catalogues could potentially bring the price down to between $2 billion and $3 billion.
The patents are widely viewed to be BlackBerry’s most valuable asset, although some observers suggest its admittedly shrinking subscriber base could still be attractive to suitors. BlackBerry has 72 million subscribers, of which 20 million are believed to be enterprise or corporate.
Also in BlackBerry’s favour is that it owns most of its facilities and has already spent a significant amount of money on restructuring and redundancies. However some analysts see next to no value in the flagging handset businesses and even estimate it would cost close to $2 billion to shut down.
BlackBerry was once widely considered the market leader in enterprise smartphones, but has seen its share eroded by the likes of Apple and Samsung devices which can offer many of the same security and administration features. Its hopes of a recovery rested on a successful launch of smartphones running the BlackBerry 10 operating system, but this has failed to revive its fortunes so far.
Last week, Microsoft acquired Nokia’s mobile phones business for $7.2 billion (£4.6bn).
BlackBerry has had a bumpy year? Try our 2013 BlackBerry quiz!
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BlackBerry Patents – Another Hi-Tech Treasure Trove?
http://www.chipworks.com/en/technical-competitive-analysis/resources/blog/blackberry-patents-another-hi-tech-treasure-trove-part-one/
Part one of a three part series offering technical and business perspectives on the BlackBerry patent portfolio.
Contributed by Miranda Lim
Eyes have been on BlackBerry for the past several weeks, as the company announced the formation of a special committee to explore strategic business alternatives, including a possible sale of the company. While BlackBerry is still evaluating the options for the future of the company, many analysts are already looking into its valuation. Of particular interest is the patent portfolio of this smartphone pioneer and dominant player in Canada’s technology community.
Scotiabank analyst Gus Papageorgiou estimated the worth of BlackBerry patents at $4.26 per share (The Globe and Mail, 14 Aug. 2013) which would amount to more than $2 billion, half of the famous $4.5 billion Nortel patent portfolio sale. To answer the questions of what these patents are about, and who might be interested in them, Chipworks has taken a closer look at the BlackBerry patent portfolio.
As shown in chart 1 below, BlackBerry started to build up its US patent portfolio in the mid ’90s – even before the first BlackBerry device was introduced in 1999. Not unexpectedly, overall patent filings have grown since 2004, a time period referenced by the now famous NTP vs BlackBerry patent litigation case and the overall recognition of BlackBerry to bolster its patent portfolio.