When BlackBerry was actively seeking a buyer, names of a lot of potential suitors came up. Lenovo, Cerberus Capital Management, Qualcomm and even ex Apple CEO John Sculley were rumored to be interested in making a bid, even BlackBerry’s co-founders wanted in on the action. The company recently announced that it has ended its strategic review and is no longer seeking a buyer, though had it not done that, it might have received another bid. Sculley tells Bloomberg that he and a group of investors were lining up a bid for the company but it yanked itself off the market.
While there was a lot of speculation about Fairfax, which had originally bid $4.7 billion to buy the company, not being able to raise the required funds, Sculley says that they were confident that they had the funds required. He adds that they didn’t think Fairfax would be able to get the deal funded, so they opted to wait and see because they believed the price might have gone down or other bidders might have jumped it. None of that happened though. Only yesterday it was reported that Lenovo was very interested in acquiring BlackBerry, but that was a deal the Canadian government wasn’t too stoked about, so it put its foot down.
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