Consumer Electronics
Could Any BlackBerry and Facebook Discussions Be Serious?
Published:
BlackBerry Limited (NASDAQ: BBRY) is a merger story that just refuses to go away. Fairfax is the interested party at $9.00 per share, and there have been published rumors and written reports discussing the co-founders, private equity buyers, and Lenovo of China all having an interest in the struggling handset maker. But what about Facebook, Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) as a possible acquirer?
Source: Courtesy BlackBerry
A report from Dow Jones signaled that Blackberry executives went out to meet with Facebook to see if there was interest. We have no way of knowing which parties or executives met, if any, and frankly we would be more than skeptical about publishing any names without absolute confirmation.
What we would be curious about is whether or not Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg would dare to be this brave. Whether running a smartphone off of Facebook Home counts as a Facebook phone is up to you to decide, but Mark Zuckerberg could be risking his relationships with hardware vendors if he saved his best stuff only to run off of BlackBerry.
Another issue is that Facebook addicts are already using other smartphones on Android and iOS platforms from Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL). They are not exactly the biggest BlackBerry customers. Apple and Google also have the lion’s share of the market share in smartphones. Even if a Windows phone may be getting more popular by some counts, Mark Zuckerberg has to know that he would be taking on the risk of losing out on being cool by owning BlackBerry.
We might be inclined to say that any buyout discussions ambitions that BlackBerry might have hopes for from Facebook could be one-sided wishful thinking. It could even be overly aggressive reporting of the matter.
Blackberry shares are up about 2.3% at $8.40 in mid-afternoon trading on Tuesday. Is that traders chasing a headline without considering any context?
Anything is possible in the world of M&A in technology, but this just doesn’t make much sense on the surface.
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