BlackBerry will change its CEO and accept a $1 billion loan from a consortium involving shareholder Fairfax Financial Holdings as it struggles with inventory and strategy problems. The company has abandoned plans to sell itself.
CEO Thorsten Heins will resign when the deal is complete, with former Sybase CEO John S. Chen joining the company as chairman and interim CEO, BlackBerry announced Monday.
The $1 billion loan takes the form of convertible debentures, exchangeable for shares at a price of $10, a 28.7% premium over Friday’s closing price, the company said. Fairfax has agreed to acquire $250 million of the debentures, with other institutional investors agreeing to take the rest. If all the debentures were converted, they would amount to around 16% of outstanding shares, BlackBerry said. In addition, the investors could purchase another $250 million of debentures, potentially raising their combined stake to 19.2%.
In September, Fairfax made a conditional offer of around $9 per share, valuing BlackBerry at around $4.7 billion, although it had not obtained financing for the deal at that time. The new arrangement puts a higher value on the company, but means Fairfax has to find less money to finance the deal.
BlackBerry thanked Heins for establishing a more efficient cost structure and overseeing delivery and adoption of the BlackBerry 10 platform and BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) 10.
The company said the deal is a “significant vote of confidence in BlackBerry and its future,” but not everyone sees it that way.
“I think it’s more of a leap of faith than a vote of confidence,” said Ben Wood, director of research at CCS Insight.
The main problem is that it doesn’t fundamentally change anything, according to Wood. It gives the company some more cash and new leadership, but BlackBerry is still a company that is finding it hard to compete with Apple and the Android camp on its own, he said.
The decision to borrow money and stay independent is in contrast to Nokia’s deal to be acquired by Microsoft.
One thing the statement issued on Monday lacked was any indication of what Chen plans to do to turn around BlackBerry; whether, for example, he will stick with the strategy the company announced in September, which called for it to reduce the number of devices and focus more on the enterprise.
“Right now there are no real answers for Blackberry, and that is a very uncomfortable place to be for investors, customers, workers and partners,” technology industry analyst Jeff Kagan said via e-mail.
BlackBerry’s smartphone OS share dropped to just 1% during the third quarter, compared to 4.3% during the same period last year, according to Strategy Analytics. In the same period shipments fell from 7.4 million to 2.5 million, the market research company said.
IDG News Service
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