Sources spill CEO Heins' beans: BlackBerry 'open' to going private

The board of BlackBerry is considering a private buyout of the company, saying that delisting would get shareholders off its back and give it freedom to move. The rumour comes from Reuters, which reports "several sources" claiming that discussions have been had with various private equity companies, and enterprise computing …

[James 51]

Not having to fend off all the short sellers must be very tempting.

[Anonymous Coward]

But why would anyone pay anything for a company clearly in terminal decline?

[Anonymous Coward]

But why would anyone pay anything for a company clearly in terminal decline?

Well they do have good software and the new phones are very good.

So what you have is a good product that isn't selling.

Buy company cheap

Sell loads of shit and turn fortunes around

Re-list on stock market 18 months later

Make obscene profit.

Nokia have managed to turn things around, and 'back when it was bad' they had crap hardware and even worse software.

[Waspy]

Re: But why would anyone pay anything for a company clearly in terminal decline?

I don't know, your analogy might be better than you think - Nokia had great hardware the whole way through, and Symbian was a very competent system with stuff that even now mostly eludes the current crop, except, ironically, BB10 (low battery drain, true multitasking, full bluetooth support, HDMI out etc).

The problem was that the UI was written by engineers and not people who understood how the average user used a phone, so you ended up with a very functional looking OS with amazing features but a labrinthine UI...so no one actually knew what those features were.

BB10 is actually very easy to use and looks pretty, so BlackBerry are clearly not doing something right.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: But why would anyone pay anything for a company clearly in terminal decline?

Blackberry's new phones are not as good or as secure as Windows Phones - they already got rooted by a flash exploit.

Nokia are killing them in their core enterprise market: http://www.mobiletoday.co.uk/Dealer_News/26246/Nokia_in_challenge_to_BlackBerry.aspx

And according to April's Kandar figures, WP is outselling BB by 8:1 in the US....

[mark l 2]

Re: But why would anyone pay anything for a company clearly in terminal decline?

That article says Nokia are supplying Lumia 720 to Britvic which are a pretty low/ mid range handsets, i think this is the major problem BB have is that they need to get a BB10 handset in the £100 - 150 price range to compete with cheap Windows phone and Android handsets.

With the Z10 costing twice as much as the Lumia 720 its not surprising they are loosing out on these big business deals

[Anonymous Coward]

Calling Carl Icahn ...

Carl Icahn to the white courtesy phone ...

Blackberry might be an ideal target for a greedy fuckwit venture capitalist like Icahn - given his anti-Midas touch (ie. everything he gets his grubby paws on seems to turn to shit) he might actually do some good at TOFKAR (The Organisation Formerly Known As RIM) - it's hard to see how things could get much worse.

That's assuming he can spare the time from trying to drive Dell onto the rocks ...