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Comment by selmnoo | Hacker News Reader

> Cisco, Google and SAP are among the other tech firms reportedly weighing bid

Fascinating. All the while we here at HN thought Blackberry was just done, done, and done, we see all these companies lining up with interest to buy? While we thought it wouldn't be acquired by any serious buyer, the 'Warren Buffet of Canada' makes the move?

We just live in another world don't we. Does anyone want to comment on this -- the big difference in our line of thinking (the typical HN reader) and that of the finance world on the outside?

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BBRY has a market cap of ~4B, and 1.5B in cash still. So really they are being picked up for practically nothing.

Edit: Make that 2.6B in cash apparently (as the article says).

  BBRY Market cap today: $4.3 bn
  Cash: "about $2.6 bn in cash"
  Patents: "estimate [...] between $1 bn and $3 bn"

That leaves not a whole lot of value in the company's other assets after the cash and patents - their personnel, supply chains and branding are valued at almost zero in the market. I'm kind of amazed by that.

Maybe they have some other debts to balance out their assets?

According to the article, no.

> BlackBerry is sitting on about $2.6 billion in cash and has no debt,

RIM has lots of patents. I imagine this is why they are strategically interested. It's obviously not for their product lineup.

Why am I getting downvoted so much?

(I'm not asking this flippantly, or protesting the fact that I'm getting downvoted. I'm just interested in knowing why -- I had no malevolent intention with the comment, I just wanted to ask a question basically.)

It's the same sort of thing that causes people to write off microsoft. Even a company in decline will often take years doing so.

It is a little justified though, the market changes rapidly and being on the wrong side of the acceleration curve can cause your company to crater at frightening speeds.

The thing about blackberry is they're not failing for ordinary reasons. They can't be fixed the way you'd rescue a once popular restaurant. It will take a lot of work to make them relevant again and only a few companies can do so.

Of all of them I think google's bid is the one most likely to be the most interesting. It's a perfect door for google into the business realm, if they can execute well it could lead to gdocs, android, and even chromeOS becoming major, multi-billion dollar businesses.

I don't see any incongruity. Google paid $12.5 billion for Motorola a few years ago.

Considering RIM's market cap was $83 billion at one point, paying ~$4-5 billion now would probably be a bargain for their patent portfolio.

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