Samsung might buy Blackberry?
Waves were made yesterday in the tech world as reports from Reuters surfaced, indicating that tech giant Samsung may have its eyes on Blackberry. Reuters has a pretty good track record with these types of things, and it says that Samsung has actually already made an offer to buy BlackBerry for up to $7.5 billion. Samsung’s end goal is to get access to Blackberry’s patent portfolio.
Samsung’s initial offer prices Blackberry at $13.35-15.49 per share, which means it would pay a premium between 38-60% over what shares were trading at before this news broke. For its part, Blackberry said that it “is aware of certain press reports published today with respect to a possible offer by Samsung to purchase BlackBerry. BlackBerry has not engaged in discussions with Samsung with respect to any possible offer to purchase BlackBerry. BlackBerry’s policy is not to comment on rumors or speculation, and accordingly it does not intend to comment further.”
In other words, Blackberry is kind of denying the rumor, but also kind of not, and is being intentionally vague.
If this deal happened, several things could result: of course Samsung could completely shut down Blackberry’s mobile division, and just use it for its patents. A more likely scenario is that Blackberry devices would continue to be produced, but probably run Android or Tizen instead of Blackberry’s own OS. In this second scenario, Samsung would gain a ton of enterprise users almost overnight.
What do you think of a potential Samsung takeover of Blackberry?
[Reuters]
