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(Image source: CNET / Sarah Tew)
BY CHRISTINA HARTMAN
BlackBerry is dropping plans to sell itself.
A rumored $4.7 billion sale to Fairfax Financial, its biggest shareholder, would have taken
the ailing company private. Fairfax reportedly had a hard time finding the money to close
the deal. (Via BlackBerry)
So now that that's dead, BlackBerry will instead raise $1 billion from investors. And that's
not the only headline coming from the troubled smartphone maker Monday.
CEO Thorsten Heins is out. He'd only been on the job since January of last year. (Via
CrackBerry)
Earlier this year the company released BlackBerry 10 in an attempt to gain back some ground
from competitors like Apple and Google's Android software. Sales were disappointing. (Via YouTube
/ Telekom Presse)
Now, former Sybase chief exec John Chen will take over as acting CEO. But back to that
$1 billion investment.
About 25 percent of it will come from Fairfax — the rest from other investors, who will
put the money into convertible debentures — which are basically promissory notes in
exchanged for loans that could be converted to stock later. (Via CBC)
Shares were down almost 13 percent in Monday morning trading, leading TechCrunch's Darrell
Etherington to conclude: "...this shift doesn't do much to detract from the uncertainty surrounding
BlackBerry's future."
Not a lot of disagreement there among the tech and business press — though Monday's
news isn't exactly surprising considering weeks of rumors a sale couldn't happen.