Fairfax Offers to Buy Blackberry

Blackberry, once a prestigious company leading the industry with top of the line smartphones and innovative research, has been reduced to being a second rate technology company trailing behind the likes of tech giants Apple and Samsung. On September 20th, 2013, 4500 employees were laid off and you could tell that Blackberry was in a hole so deep that it in about 12 -24 months it might have spelled the end for the Canadian company. Hope has arrived for this tech company; the founder and previous CEO Mike Lazaridis and his love for his company may have found the lifeline-the saving grace-that can lead Blackberry to redemption.
Over the past month, Mike has been travelling and visiting many financial groups who are willing to buy out all the shares of the company and privatize it once again. For those who do not understand the benefits of privatizing the company, it essentially means that the stocks of Blackberry will not be sold and traded on the market and since there are no shareholders, they will not be able to influence the direction of the company. This is good because it is partly the shareholder’s fault that Blackberry has been reduced to such a state; now people who want to keep the company afloat over making money can push the company in the needed direction, letting it grow to be a tech giant that could compete with others in its industry.
The financial group that is looking to buy this company, Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd, gave a preliminary offer to Blackberry on September 23rd, 2013 to buy Blackberry for 4.7 billion dollars. This is only the first step. The offer can be rejected if Blackberry does find another offer, although Fairfax is the top stakeholder and the closest to being able to buy back all the shares of Blackberry. However there is a long way to go and many more obstacles may arise. Just recently, on October the 4th, Blackberry was being sued for misleading the shareholders and inflating the price by creating a very rosy picture of what they planned to achieve with the new BB10 lines. The future is far from certain.