
BlackBerry Met With Facebook Last Week to Discuss Potential Bid - kloncks
http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702304655104579165781081533064-lMyQjAxMTAzMDIwOTEyNDkyWj
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boyter
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.

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redthrowaway
Print version for those that prefer their text to be text:
[http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702304...](http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702304655104579165781081533064-lMyQjAxMTAzMDIwOTEyNDkyWj#printMode)

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.

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selmnoo
> 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?

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recuter
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).

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bdc

      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.

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

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abrahamsen
According to the article, no.

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

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programminggeek
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.

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jjoe
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.

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samstave
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.

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taylor-smith
A usatoday article? C'mon

