Every publicly traded company is always up for sale.
BlackBerry puts itself up for sale
91–100 of 115 posts
Re: BlackBerry puts itself up for sale
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
But he is saying the $5bn already includes a discount for the cash you will get back. The market knows it has 3bn in cash lying around, so the market reckons that all of Blackberry's future profits and its on hand cash, are worth $8bn today, but that includes the $3bn of cash, so it adjusts the shares down to be $5bn - effectively saying the market thinks Blackberry can generate another $5bn worth of dividend-able pr…
What is the market cap of a lemonade stand with 3bn cash?
Err, ok I am missing something from my basic economics - I was pretty certain the market cap of a company was its projected lifetime profits.
So if a lemonade stand has 3bn in cash it's done pretty well selling lemonade surely?
Re: BlackBerry puts itself up for sale
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
And why can't they be remade? It seems to me once upon a time Apple was in dire straights.
Perhaps it is being remade. They (finally, belatedly) got rid of the old guard at RIM, including the CEOs. The question is if Thorsten Heins can pull a Jobs. Which isn't a knock on him if he can't - after all, Steve Jobs was an extreme outlier in a field of extreme outliers. That said, Apple turned themselves by mostly abandoning their roots (big beige boxen) and go in a completely different, largely unprecedented di…
> Even the iMac, iconic as it was, wasn't the turnaround point for Apple - iPod was.
Good point. Reminds me of Chrysler under Iaccoca. The K-car stopped the cash bleed and restored the company's reputation, but it was the minivan that made them fabulously profitable.
Re: BlackBerry puts itself up for sale
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the most likely endgame is that they'll pull a Nokia: either an outright MSFT purchase or becoming a heavily-subsidized client state. * Microsoft still has plenty of cash, but is facing an existential crisis of losing platform relevance * Their overall mobile marketshare is so low that they can probably throw that cash around with much antitrust attention * They've had a hard time attracting hardware makers o…
I highly doubt that MS will be the party to bite. BB uses a customized QnX that is about as far away from Windows Phone as you could probably go without doing something really exotic. If that were their route they'd have to drop their investment in QnX, try to adapt all BB software to run under the latest incarnation of Windows Phone rather than to just run Windows Phone on it. BB users are quite particular about the…
main asset that Blackberry has right now is BBM, their messaging infrastructure. I fear the hardware and BB10 operating system will not make it
Re: BlackBerry puts itself up for sale
#95As an Android developer by day, and a BlackBerry developer by night, it boggles my mind why everyone thinks BB10 is crap, and that no one wants it. Spend 1 week with a BlackBerry Z10 or Q10, and you'll see how great it actually is in comparison to other platforms. Spend some time developing an app for it in Qt and Cascades, and you'll see how great it is to develop for, in comparison to other platforms. People also n…
BB10 may be nice but the damn thing still lacks apps. There's no point having a great phone and great OS with no app coverage. At least three times now in the past month someone has recommended an app to me an sure enough...no blackberry option. Android and iOS only. What I don't understand is why they don't force popular apps onto their platform. Even if no companies are jumping to develop for Blackberry, pay them t…
They have tried to pay companies for apps, and they have in the past. It isn't enough. My company is an example, as are others.
Re: BlackBerry puts itself up for sale
#96Man, the long sad story of RIM/Blackberry. They should learn something from Samsung, and Samsung should heed the history of RIM.
Blackberry made good hardware with terrible, terrible software. Samsung, so far, has focused on hardware and left the software to other people. It has allowed Samsung to focus on their core expertise and grow fast.
However, there is always the rumor that Samsung is building Tizen internally. This, IMO, would be a huge mistake. Samsung should focus on phones and leave the software to other people (Android, Ubuntu).
Realistically, I think Blackberry could do the same if they focused on their hardware and the enterprise market. If there was a high-riser who was shooting for something in Blackberry, they should be talking to Canonical right now and focus on making Ubuntu enterprise ready on their hardware. They could dominate that market for years.
Re: BlackBerry puts itself up for sale
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
From an acquisition perspective, the "price" is Market Cap + Debt - Cash. The total cost comes to just over $2B. At that price, I see it as a no brainer for Microsoft. They just need to ship a windows phone that is compatible with all the BB enterprise stuff, and IT departments will force it on the employees.
> From an acquisition perspective, the "price" is Market Cap + Debt - Cash So the more debt company has, and the less cash it has, the more valuable it is? That makes no sense at all.
not more valuable - the more expensive it is.
The market cap is the sticker price - how much it will cost to buy all the shares.
The cash the company has on hand is like a mail-in-rebate. After you've bought the company, you'll get that cash back, so you consider that rebate value against the sticker price when evaluating the price you're actually going to have to pay.
Debt is like an extra cost you also have to take on when you purchase the company - like a delivery charge. So you need to add that on to the sticker price to evaluate the true cost.
Since the true price is market cap + debt - cash, and the debt and cash are somewhat fixed, it should come as no surprise that the market cap, via the share price, adjusts itself such that the true price reflects the company's value more accurately than the market cap does.
So it's the other way round: the more debt a company of a given value has, the lower its market cap will be. Which makes more sense.
Re: BlackBerry puts itself up for sale
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the market cap of a lemonade stand with 3bn cash?
Err, ok I am missing something from my basic economics - I was pretty certain the market cap of a company was its projected lifetime profits. So if a lemonade stand has 3bn in cash it's done pretty well selling lemonade surely?
Market capitalization is just the valuation implied by the current share price. (share_price * n_shares).
For a less ridiculous hypothetical, we know that BBRY has $3bn in cash right now. Supposing that it instead had $10bn in cash, its valuation would not be the same, it would be $7b higher. Its stock price (and equivalently its market capitalization) would reflect that, because the stock market is a place where people who disagree about the how to value the company go to make trades they believe are favorable. People who go to the public markets and act on the belief that ($10b in cash + a niche mobile phone business) should be valued at $5b would be rare. They would also be very wrong.
The current valuation of $5b implies that the niche phone business is worth $2b and the $3b in cash is worth $3b.
Re: BlackBerry puts itself up for sale
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
I highly doubt that MS will be the party to bite. BB uses a customized QnX that is about as far away from Windows Phone as you could probably go without doing something really exotic. If that were their route they'd have to drop their investment in QnX, try to adapt all BB software to run under the latest incarnation of Windows Phone rather than to just run Windows Phone on it. BB users are quite particular about the…
> If that were their route they'd have to drop their investment in QnX Just as Nokia had to drop their investment in Symbian and Maemo > BB users are quite particular about their handsets However they're not particular about BB10 (the QNX one you mention) since most of them aren't even running it. If anything, the fact that they're in the middle of a delicate platform shift makes the parallels with Nokia in 2011 all…
Nokia is getting $250 million each quarter from Microsoft, minus the price of the OS licenses, minus the foregone revenue from supplying Nokia Maps for free to non-Nokia Windows Phones.
With 7.4 million Lumias sold last quarter, at $25 per Windows Phone license, Nokia is drawing just $70 million each quarter from Microsoft. At 10 million units, they'd start paying Microsoft money.
Blackberry sold 6.8 million units last quarter. They have no maps to license to Microsoft. If they signed an agreement with Microsoft tomorrow, it'd still take several months for the first handset to come out. What would Blackberry be worth to Microsoft in a year?
The numbers are not in Blackberry's favor. That having been said, I will never underestimate Steve Ballmer's ability to overpay for a deal.