New BlackBerry Buyout Interest, Just Do Not Ignore the $7 Warning

Dow Jones has written a report that Cerberus Capital Management LP, one of the top private equity firms, is seeking to sign a confidentiality agreement with BlackBerry in order to do the proper financial due diligence. We would point out that expressing interest is far from making a new buyout offer. It is also far from signaling that it would seek to make a higher buyout offer than the $9 that Fairfax has indicated.

We would also point out that this interest from Fairfax is not exactly a formal buyout. It is subject to due diligence and financing and there is a go-shop provision.

So, there may be some serious concern that the $9 buyout price will either not hold or would be walked away from. BlackBerry closed at $7.92 on Tuesday and was trading down as low as $5.51 on Wednesday morning. This is a wide enough spread that the market is signaling two things: 1) there will not be a super-premium bidding war and 2) that the deal may not happen at all.

On Monday we highlighted that an analyst at Canaccord Genuity gave only a $7 price target on shares of BlackBerry. The consumer business was given a long-term value of zero, and the report warned that few future sales opportunities exist. Even the intellectual property was valued at $1.5 billion versus the $3.5 billion that the company thinks they are worth. Even the cash expected value was slashed down to $1 billion due to loss expectations, financial commitments and severances. The enterprise subscriber base was given a value of only $1.25 billion.

Maybe Cerberus is interested and maybe it is not. The reality is that the case for a super-premium deal is dwindling each week that new audience and consumer trends measurements are available. The Android phones from Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) and the iPhones from Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) have handily killed BlackBerry.

Everyone seems to have either an iOS or an Android smartphone these days. The elephant in the room that nobody wants to acknowledge is that BlackBerry as a phone is perhaps just the next Palm. When was the last time you saw a Palm phone in use?

BlackBerry shares were up almost 2% at $8.07 in mid-afternoon trading on Wednesday. That may be better than earlier in the day, but it is still far from the $9 bogey that is currently used as a benchmark.