Hope of a BlackBerry Co-founders Rival Bid: From Hype to Despair

Consumer Electronics

Published: October 11, 2013 11:45 am

BlackBerry Ltd. (NASDAQ: BBRY) is highly troubled. News that more possible bidders are interested in competing against Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd. (NYSE: FFH) to take the company private is surprising and obvious at the same time. News is circulating that BlackBerry co-founders Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin are interested in making a competing bid. These men founded it as Research In Motion, and frankly it seems hard to consider what they really could do with the company this long after the implosion.

Bloomberg reported that the two would raise capital to compete with a $4.7 billion Fairfax proposal. What is interesting is that Fairfax is BlackBerry’s largest shareholder. We still have no financial details or disclosures made public by Fairfax, nor do we even know if the offer will remain the same after the due diligence.

It seems difficult to imagine how the two co-founders could end up in a competitive bidding process. What is more pointed is that it is hard to know how to think these two could turn the ship around. If they were so great, they already could have been brought back in.

24/7 Wall St. recently pointed out that the sum of the parts actually may be more than the whole BlackBerry. Do not say you haven’t been warned if these co-founders either make no bid or cannot come up with more capital and a plan to turn BlackBerry around.

The company’s stock price was down $0.02 at $8.18 late on Friday morning, which is still not that much more encouraging than after Cerberus became a rumored interested party. BlackBerry’s 52-week trading range is $7.46 to $18.32, and the current market cap is $4.21 billion.

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