New contenders may emerge in battle for control of BlackBerry

CTV Kitchener: More offers for BlackBerry? Analysts say another bid could be made for BlackBerry, and shareholders say the company should be worth more than $4.7B. Max Wark reports.

If BlackBerry is sold, how will individual shareholders – including Waterloo Region residents who may have bought a small piece of the company to show their support for local business – fare?

Currently, there is only one offer on the table for the smartphone manufacturer.

Toronto-based Fairfax Financial Holdings, which already owns 10 per cent of the company, heads up a consortium that has offered $4.7 billion for the remaining 90 per cent.

That translates to a sale price of $9 per share – less than Don Nightingale and his wife, along with most other shareholders, paid.

Nightingale says he’s hopeful another suitor will emerge for the Waterloo-based company – but even if it does, he doesn’t expect anyone to offer significantly more than the Fairfax consortium.

“We don’t think there will be that kind of interest,” he says.

Allan Foerster, a business professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, doesn’t foresee a massive bidding war over BlackBerry either.

But the emergence of one other bid – specifically, one headed up by company co-founder Mike Lazaridis – wouldn’t surprise him.

“I think Mike still has enough passion for the business that if he were to be able to take the company private, re-engineer the technology and come out with ‘BlackBerry 2’ – something to again change the handset market the way BlackBerry first did – that’s the dark horse in this,” Foerster tells CTV News.

Other bidders are less likely, Foerster says, both because they’ve “already kicked the tires and passed on that opportunity” and because of the short, six-week timeframe for BlackBerry to seek non-Fairfax offers.

Financial analyst Robert McWhirter, president of Selective Asset Management, agrees that there remains potential in BlackBerry to reassert itself if given a new ofcus.

“Clearly there’s a very loyal base in the enterprise side,” he said Tuesday on BNN.

“There are some parts of (BlackBerry) that are interesting, but they are facing challenges.”

Whatever the outcome, Nightingale says he and his wife will ride out the impending storm and be satisfied with whatever price they’re paid for their shares.

“We’re going to hang in there,” he says.

“We think we owe that to BlackBerry.”