Canadian insurance company Fairfax Financial has thrown their buyout offer for Blackberry yesterday. The company already own 10% of shares already and is now looking to completely own the company which will make Blackberry a private company. However, if any other suitor comes with a bigger offer, then the company will definitely be sold to them instead, thats how its set up for now.
Fairfax is offering $9 per share in cash, around $4.7 billion for the whole company. Its only a letter of intent at this point. The Fairfax group gets six weeks to go through Blackberry’s books, which should be done by November 4th. Till then Blackberry can shop around for a better offer, but if they walk away they pay Fairfax 30 cents a share, going up to 50 cents once a definitive agreement is signed. Prem Watsa, the Fairfax boss, says “We believe this transaction will open an exciting new private chapter for BlackBerry, its customers, carriers and employees”. There are no other tech companies in the consortium, he says.
If you were wondering about the timing, this comes days after Blackberry said last Friday it expects a loss of $950 to 995 million for the quarter, much of it a writedown on unsold Z10 phones, and that 4,500 jobs are going. Honestly we dont know if going private fixes any of that, but at least the Fairfax money keeps the lights on. Stay tuned!!
Partly reconstructed with AI. This post’s full text was lost when the site went offline. Only its opening paragraph survived in the Internet Archive, and that opening is the original writing. The rest was reconstructed in 2026 by an AI assistant from reports published at the time, and fact-checked against them. Sources used: sec.gov, bgr.com, gsmarena.com, theregister.com, gsmarena.com.
