On the 12th August 2013 the board of directors at BlackBerry announced they have formed a special committee to “explore strategic alternatives to enhance value and increase scale in order to accelerate BlackBerry 10 deployment. These alternatives could include, among others, possible joint ventures, strategic partnerships or alliances, a sale of the Company or other possible transactions”
Two phrases stick out for me on this one “possible joint venture” & “sale of the Company”
I would be surprised to see a joint venture with another mobile player or OS provider at this stage, the tight tie up between Nokia and Microsoft is slowly increasing sales numbers of the Nokia Lumia range, but there aren’t many other cases of it happening and my gut feel is that BlackBerry need something to move quickly for them.
So are they ripe for a “sale of the Company” to another manufacturer? I can’t think who would have the cash and the incentive to do so, apple have their ways of working, they certainly have the cash but the desire?
Samsung are nearing, according to figures we have seen, a domination of the smartphone market, so you would have to ask if they need BlackBerry to continue on this road.
So what about a network? There have been rumours in the past of Vodafone interest, but they have recently sunk an enormous amount of cash into the purchase of Cable & Wireless as they pursue their plan of being the number 1 choice for unified communications and not just a mobile telecommunications company.
All we can say is that the official statement is out there, at the time of writing shares have been suspended from trading, so moves may well be in place.
Regardless of what happens in my non-important opinion, a healthy, competitive BlackBerry are an important component of the telecommunications sector. Many of our customers still favour the security of BlackBerry and it’s proven ability to fire through emails on the move. Add to that, BB10 is such a leap forward in operating system from BB7 that I want to see them keep fighting back in the smartphone wars.
Good luck BlackBerry.