BlackBerry has agreed to be bought by a consortium of Canadian investment companies for $4.7bn in cash and taken private, in a last-ditch move to ensure the survival of one of the pioneers of the global smartphone industry.
BlackBerry, whose handheld devices were nicknamed “CrackBerrys” because of their ubiquity in the suit pockets of the world’s business and political elite, has seen its market value plummet from a peak of $83bn in 2008 to just $4.2bn ahead of the announcement yesterday.
The bid comes in the wake of BlackBerry’s admission on Friday that its turnround strategy – based on the launch of a new operating system and handsets – had failed and that it would abandon the consumer market with the loss of 4,500 jobs and report a $1bn operating loss in the latest quarter.