BlackBerry Agrees to Sell Itself for a Measly $4.7 Billion

Failed smartphone maker BlackBerry has agreed to sell itself to Canadian financiers for less than $5 billion, ending one of the most spectacular declines in recent tech history.  BlackBerry said yesterday that it had signed a letter of intent to sell itself to Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd. for $4.7 billion, or $9 per share — more than $1.50 lower than the stock’s closing price Thursday. The fire sale shows just how desperate BlackBerry had become to halt the hemorrhaging that became even more intense on Friday, when the company announced it was likely to report losses of nearly $1 billion in the most recent quarter and was cutting 40 percent of its workforce, or 4,500 workers.

  BlackBerry shares had fallen below $8.25 before trading was halted ahead of the announcement of the Fairfax deal. The deal would take BlackBerry private. Fairfax CEO Prem Watsa — who resigned from BlackBerry’s board last month over “potential conflicts” as the company explored a possible sale — said that the future of BlackBerry lies with “secure enterprise solutions,” in keeping with the company’s stated plans last week to move away from the consumer market.  BlackBerry’s demise happened alongside the arrival of the iPhone and the smartphone revolution that followed, though the decline did not take hold immediately. In mid-2008, nearly a year after the iPhone was released, BlackBerry shares — then trading as Research in Motion — peaked at an adjusted high of $147.55, a price that today would have valued the company at more than $77 billion.  At the time, investors clearly would never have believed that the company that had pioneered mobile messaging would essentially commit corporate suicide through misstep after misstep, never figuring out how to hold onto the market it had nearly singlehandedly created. As late as 2009, BlackBerry still dominated among U.S. smartphone subscribers, and even in 2010, it led iOS and Android by a sliver. By this summer, BlackBerry’s share of the worldwide market had fallen to the low single digits.  Once BlackBerry goes private, its survival will only really matter to its workers and the corporate and government clients who continue to use the platform. But the company won’t likely sink into anonymity entirely: Its implosion will loom as a nightmare to haunt the dreams of tech CEOs whose companies’ heydays have long since passed.