slykat: I'm looking at asset liquidation value too, but my conclusions are different from yours. According to the June 1, 2014 financial statements[1]:
* Cash, short-term and long-term liquid investments, receivables, and assets held for sale totaled $6.0 billion. (I wouldn't dare put a dollar value on inventories, because their value declines at an accelerating pace, like a waterfall, due to the rapid pace of technological change.)
* Property plant & equipment (consisting mostly of land and buildings) totals $2.2 billion. Let's give them full credit for this figure.
* Total liabilities are $3.7 billion.
So, assuming you can liquidate the whole business quickly, the liquidation value of all tangible assets appears to be somewhere around $6.0 + $2.2 - $3.7 = $4.5 billion. However, the company is hemorrhaging money by the day and suffering from anti-network effects that can make revenues drop like a waterfall (instead of declining in a gentle slope), so this estimate may be optimistic. In a year, the figure could very well be down to $3.5 billion.
That leaves the value of intellectual property, carried on the books at $3.5 billion. Of that amount, $0.8 billion is the price paid for Blackberry's share of the Nortel patents[2]; the reminder consists primarily of all the Blackberry software they've developed in-house (that is, their proprietary OS and applications, built on top of QNX), which is valuable to third parties only to the extent they want to build a business around it. My (conservative) guess: this is worth a LOT less than $3.5 billion -- maybe ~$1 billion -- but I don't know for sure.[3]
At a proposed purchase price of $4.7 billion, the margin of safety looks very slim to me.
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[1] http://ca.blackberry.com/content/dam/bbCompany/Desktop/Globa...
[2] See the "Intangible Assets, Net" notes in http://press.blackberry.com/content/dam/rim/press/PDF/Financ...
[3] For reference, QNX -- the jewel in Blackberry's software portfolio -- has been sold twice over the past decade. Harman International bought it for $138 million in 1994, and then sold it to RIM for $200 million in 2010. These figures are rounding errors compared to $4.7 billion. Source: http://blog.vdcresearch.com/embedded_sw/2010/04/update-2-rim...