BlackBerry Ltd, on the block as its smartphone business struggles, is in talks with Cisco Systems, Google Inc and SAP about selling them all or parts of itself, several sources close to the matter said.
Such a deal would be an alternative to the preliminary agreement reached weeks ago with a group led by BlackBerry’s biggest shareholder, Fairfax Financial Holdings, to take the company private for about US$4.7 billion, a bid which has faced some skepticism because of financing doubts.
The Ontario-based company — formerly known as Research In Motion Ltd — has asked for preliminary expressions of interest from potential strategic buyers, which also include Intel Corp and Asian companies LG Corp and Samsung Electronics Co, by early next week.
It is unclear which parties will bid, if any. However, the potential buyers have been especially interested in BlackBerry’s secure server network and patent portfolio, although doubts about the assets’ value are an issue, the sources said.
Possible bidders are proceeding with caution given the uncertainty around BlackBerry, which last month reported a quarterly loss of nearly US$1 billion after taking a writedown on unsold Z10 phones.
The value of BlackBerry’s patent portfolio and licensing agreements is likely to halve in the next 18 months, a company filing shows, potentially limiting its attractiveness.
According to analysts, BlackBerry’s assets include a shrinking yet well-regarded services business that powers its security-focused messaging system, worth from US$3 billion to US$4.5 billion; a collection of patents that could be worth up to US$3 billion; and US$3.1 billion in cash and investments.
Adding to the company’s woes, it is likely to burn through almost US$2 billion of its cash pile in the next year-and-a-half, Bernstein analyst Pierre Ferragu wrote on Thursday after studying the filing.
Private equity firms that have showed interest in BlackBerry — which also include Cerberus Capital Management — have asked the company and its advisers to provide additional financial details about its various business segments, two of the sources said. That process could take another few weeks, as BlackBerry focuses on taking bids from industry peers, the sources said.
“The special committee, with the assistance of BlackBerry’s independent financial and legal advisors, is conducting a robust and thorough review of strategic alternative,” a BlackBerry spokesman said in an e-mailed statement.
Separately, a BlackBerry shareholder sued the company and its executives on Friday, accusing them of inflating the stock price by painting a misleadingly rosy picture of the business prospects of its BlackBerry 10 smartphone line.
BlackBerry misled investors last year by saying that the company was “progressing on its financial and operational commitments,” and that previews of its BlackBerry 10 platform were well-received by developers, according to shareholder Marvin Pearlstein in a lawsuit lodged in Manhattan federal court.
Pearlstein is seeking to represent a class of “thousands” of shareholders who bought stock between Sept. 27 last year, when the company touted its strong financial position, and Sept. 20 this year, when it revealed it would have to write down between US$930 million and US$960 million related to unsold BlackBerry 10 devices, the lawsuit says.
“In reality, the BlackBerry 10 was not well-received by the market, and the company was forced to ... lay off approximately 4,500 employees, totaling approximately 40 percent of its total workforce,” it added.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained