Bye Bye Blackberry (as we know it) as smartphone maker agrees to takeover
Canadian smartphone manufacturer Blackberry has agreed in principle to sell the company to a consortium led by Fairfax Financial.
Blackberry said Fairfax, its largest shareholder, offered over 3.6 billion euros.
It has been a hectic few days for Blackberry. On Friday it announced job cuts, losses of 1 billion US dollars and a shift in corporate strategy away from individual consumers.
Ken Wong is a business professor at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada: “I think this option has been known to them for a long time, and I think what really precipitated them taking this action because, it is not something they wanted to do. It was the news of the billion dollar lose this quarter, all of the layoffs, and the massive depreciation in stock prices.”
The company’s decline has been rapid in a fast moving industry. It has seen its share of the global market fall from 17 percent in 2010 to an estimated 3 percent this year.
Poor sales of its new Z and Q 10 handsets indicated that Blackberry would never reclaim its slice of the pie.
Blackberry says it will continue to explore other options while negotiations with Fairfax continue.
