BlackBerry founders consider bid - Connexie

Published: Friday, October 11, 2013
By: Joost Biederman

Mike Lazardis and Douglas Fregin, both founders of BlackBerry smartphone manufacturer, aligned themselves with the list interested in a possible acquisition of the Canadian company. This is shown by an official document that has been lodged. U.S. financial regulator This referred to the fact that the duo is working on a book study in the company.

the two founders of BlackBerry is the biggest challenge in getting around the necessary funding. For the acquisition of their brainchild, an amount of a sloppy 4.7 billion U.S. dollars are on the table. That is the height of an existing bid made by the investment fund Fairfax Financial Holdings, the largest shareholder in BlackBerry. Mike Lazardis and Douglas Fregin jointly have ever 8 percent of the BlackBerry shares held, while Fairfax Financial Holdings has a stake of 10 percent does.

The fact that the Canadian BlackBerry smartphone manufacturer in the window state, has also aroused the interest of several major ICT companies. Besides Cisco, Google and SAP, the South Korean manufacturers LG and Samsung now exploratory talks with the BlackBerry management conducted. The main interest of the various parties is, say the spoken by Reuters anonymous sources, out to the secure server environment of BlackBerry and the number of patents the company has listed in his name. There are also some investment companies have surfaced that BlackBerry as a whole would take over. In this context, circulates the name of Cerberus Capital Management, an investment company that specializes in taking over distressed companies.

The value of BlackBerry is estimated by analysts at up to 10.6 billion U.S. dollars. Of that amount would be accounted for by the mail system up to 4.5 billion. The patents can provide a cool $ 3 billion, while the company is still standing.

itself a tight $ 2 billion in the bank

BlackBerry has now attracted the undivided attention of shareholder Marvin Perlstein. He has the company on behalf of a group of shareholders who bought between September 2012 and September 2013 shares a class-action lawsuit. The complainants believe that the management has lied about the future of BlackBerry them. According to the British newspaper The Guardian would go to several thousand cases.

Pearlstein argues that BlackBerry has misled its shareholders by stating that the company “made financial claims and failed to meet its operational requirements.” Also, the company would have given that it was brand new operating system BlackBerry 10 well received by developers. Impression “In reality, BlackBerry 10 not well received by the market, which the company was forced to lay off 4,500 employees representing approximately 40 percent of the total workforce,” write Pearlstein in his indictment. In addition the company also CEO Thorsten Heins and CFO Brian Bidulka defendants in the case. BlackBerry has already said it will study.

the indictment