BlackBerry Met With Facebook Last Week to Discuss Potential Bid | Hacker News Reader

BlackBerry Met With Facebook Last Week to Discuss Potential Bid

online.wsj.com

30 pointskloncks15 comments

I always thought that Blackberry would be a strategic buy for Oracle. They would then be in a position to provide near end to end business services for enterprises assuming assuming they started manufacturing laptops and PC's or acquired someone already in that space.

Print version for those that prefer their text to be text: http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702304...

A word to the wise for those who don't: find a nice, quite corner of the screen, and leave your cursor there. WSJ seems to think that every single element on that page needs to have a big tooltip that jumps out and blocks the article whenever your cursor grazes it.

> Cisco, Google and SAP are among the other tech firms reportedly weighing bid

Fascinating. All the while we here at HN thought Blackberry was just done, done, and done, we see all these companies lining up with interest to buy? While we thought it wouldn't be acquired by any serious buyer, the 'Warren Buffet of Canada' makes the move?

We just live in another world don't we. Does anyone want to comment on this -- the big difference in our line of thinking (the typical HN reader) and that of the finance world on the outside?

RIM has lots of patents. I imagine this is why they are strategically interested. It's obviously not for their product lineup.

BBRY has a market cap of ~4B, and 1.5B in cash still. So really they are being picked up for practically nothing.

Edit: Make that 2.6B in cash apparently (as the article says).

  BBRY Market cap today: $4.3 bn
  Cash: "about $2.6 bn in cash"
  Patents: "estimate [...] between $1 bn and $3 bn"

That leaves not a whole lot of value in the company's other assets after the cash and patents - their personnel, supply chains and branding are valued at almost zero in the market. I'm kind of amazed by that.

Maybe they have some other debts to balance out their assets?

According to the article, no.

> BlackBerry is sitting on about $2.6 billion in cash and has no debt,

It's the same sort of thing that causes people to write off microsoft. Even a company in decline will often take years doing so.

It is a little justified though, the market changes rapidly and being on the wrong side of the acceleration curve can cause your company to crater at frightening speeds.

The thing about blackberry is they're not failing for ordinary reasons. They can't be fixed the way you'd rescue a once popular restaurant. It will take a lot of work to make them relevant again and only a few companies can do so.

Of all of them I think google's bid is the one most likely to be the most interesting. It's a perfect door for google into the business realm, if they can execute well it could lead to gdocs, android, and even chromeOS becoming major, multi-billion dollar businesses.

Why am I getting downvoted so much?

(I'm not asking this flippantly, or protesting the fact that I'm getting downvoted. I'm just interested in knowing why -- I had no malevolent intention with the comment, I just wanted to ask a question basically.)

I don't see any incongruity. Google paid $12.5 billion for Motorola a few years ago.

Considering RIM's market cap was $83 billion at one point, paying ~$4-5 billion now would probably be a bargain for their patent portfolio.

BlackBerry still has millions of customers and a pretty decent OS built, someone could buy them and probably do pretty well, especially someone like Lenovo, Oracle, Dell, IBM, etc.

This somewhat explains (but doesn't justify) their desperate, last minute push of BBM across competing platforms. With real subscriber cash flow taking a nose dive, reasoning now is let's grab user market share and look good for a sell out pulling the social network card that's BBM.

FB phone an epic flop - let's buy the dinosaur of the market!

Id love to see FB buy rim just to see the debacle of throwing their hubris at the HW and see how widely it misses the mark.

A usatoday article? C'mon

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