A group led by its largest shareholder, Fairfax Financial Holding Ltd., on September 23, 2013 signed a letter of intent to buy BlackBerry for $4.7 billion. The Canadian company, which pioneered the smart phone segment in 1999 and whose market value rose to $83 billion in June 2008, had in recent days struggled to survive in the crowded smartphone market. Its shareholder will receive $9 a share as part of the transaction.
To underline the difficult situation ahead, BlackBerry on September 27, 2013 announced disastrous results for its Fiscal second quarter (June 1-Aug 31) with $965 million in loss on $1.6 billion in sales. Most of its loss was due to $934 million in charge related to write-down of its bulging inventory of BlackBerry Z10 phones, which were central to the hope of CEO Thorsten Heins to turn around the company to better compete with Apple and Samsung.
On November 4, 2013, Fairfax Financial Holding Ltd. backed away from takeover bid, and instead pledged to put $1 billion as part of a revised investment proposal. Also, BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins announced that he was stepping down, and John Chen, former CEO of software data company Sybase, was appointed the Chairman and interim CEO. Chen made it clear on November 4 that his focus would be to sell software and services, not the hardware. Chen was very impressed by users downloading BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) after it was available on rival Google's Android and Apple's iOS platforms in the last 10 days. BlackBerry's downfall is steep in recent years: At the end of August 2012, BlackBerry subscriber base was as high as 80 million, and in one year (August 2013), it swooped to as low as 65 million.
To underline the difficult situation ahead, BlackBerry on September 27, 2013 announced disastrous results for its Fiscal second quarter (June 1-Aug 31) with $965 million in loss on $1.6 billion in sales. Most of its loss was due to $934 million in charge related to write-down of its bulging inventory of BlackBerry Z10 phones, which were central to the hope of CEO Thorsten Heins to turn around the company to better compete with Apple and Samsung.
On November 4, 2013, Fairfax Financial Holding Ltd. backed away from takeover bid, and instead pledged to put $1 billion as part of a revised investment proposal. Also, BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins announced that he was stepping down, and John Chen, former CEO of software data company Sybase, was appointed the Chairman and interim CEO. Chen made it clear on November 4 that his focus would be to sell software and services, not the hardware. Chen was very impressed by users downloading BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) after it was available on rival Google's Android and Apple's iOS platforms in the last 10 days. BlackBerry's downfall is steep in recent years: At the end of August 2012, BlackBerry subscriber base was as high as 80 million, and in one year (August 2013), it swooped to as low as 65 million.
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