ICT companies circling BlackBerry - Connexie

Published: Monday, October 7, 2013
By: Joost Biederman

The fact that the Canadian BlackBerry smartphone manufacturer in the window state, has attracted the interest of several major ICT companies. Thus network giant Cisco, the Internet company Google and the software maker SAP talking about the possible purchase of parts of BlackBerry. That enable anonymous insiders in a message from the Reuters news agency.

Since the management of BlackBerry has discussed the future seem that developments around the Canadian company to be hit momentum. First, it was decided that the smartphone maker withdraws from the market. The largest shareholder, Fairfax Financial Holdings, is the main lender for the delisting. It has therefore about 4.7 U.S. dollars milljard down.

Parallel also examine the sale of business units. The delisting The latter have been the first candidates found. Besides Cisco, Google and SAP, the South Korean manufacturers LG and Samsung shown interest in exploratory talks with the BlackBerry management. 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.

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. Himself a tight $ 2 billion on the couch

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