The Canadian insurance company, Fairfax, has said that it wants to buy Blackberry, mostly for its large collection of smartphone patents. Fairfax has a 10% stake in the company, and would potentially buy it for $4.7 billion. However, some think that the proposal is just a strategy for raising other companies’ bids.
Blackberry has been struggling for quite some time, but Chris Marlett, CEO of MDB Capital Group, estimates the value of Blackberry’s patents to be around $2 billion to $3 billion. Marlett also said that Blackberry’s is “the last big portfolio likely to go to sale anytime soon.” If a company were to purchase the portfolio, they would have a great advantage in the smartphone market.
“At this point, [intellectual property]is such a large percentage of Blackberry’s value because their business is falling apart,” Marlett said. “There’s little value for the company’s actual hardware business, given its problems.”
However, Anil Doradla, stock analyst at William Blair and Company, says that BlackBerry’s “hardware, infrastructure and operating system” are worth about $2 billion, and its 60 million subscribers add another significant amount of value. But, she warned, “a buyer doesn’t know if those subscribers will be around in a month.”
