Matt Levine, Columnist

BlackBerry Announces That Someone Maybe Wants to Buy It

It's fun to talk about optimal M&A strategy but really that's a luxury reserved for happier companies than BlackBerry.

September 23, 2013 at 7:18 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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It's fun to talk about optimal M&A strategy but really that's a luxury reserved for happier companies than BlackBerry, which today announced that Fairfax Financial Holdings, which currently owns about 9.9 percent of its shares, wants to buy the rest of the company for $9 a share.* This is sort of an unimpressive deal. For one thing, BlackBerry closed at $10.52 on Thursday so selling the company at $9 today seems pretty rough.

On the other hand, BlackBerry's earnings had a horrible horrible accident shortly after that Thursday close, and then they fired everyone and stuff, so you can't get too worked up about the price. It's more than zero!