A BlackBerry cell phone is displayed for sale at Fixx wireless in Miami on Monday. Photo: CFP

 

BlackBerry Ltd abandoned its plan on Monday (Canada time) to sell itself and said its CEO is stepping down, sparking a 16 percent dive in its share price and raising fears the struggling smartphone maker is running out of options.

After a two-month review of strategic options and talks with potential buyers that included Facebook, Lenovo and private equity firms such as Cerberus Capital Management LP, BlackBerry said it will abandon a sale. Instead, it will raise $1 billion by issuing convertible notes to a group of long-term investors including its largest shareholder, Fairfax Financial Holdings.

The only formal offer to buy BlackBerry - a tentative one - had come from Fairfax, which wanted to take the company private for $4.7 billion. But sources said Fairfax boss Prem Watsa had trouble financing the deal. Fairfax will now end up with $250 million of the debt offering.

"BlackBerry is hemorrhaging employees, it is hemorrhaging customers. The only thing that's growing is doubt," said John Stephenson, a senior vice president at First Asset Investment Management and one of BlackBerry's disgruntled investors.

BlackBerry founders Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin had partnered with Cerberus and mobile chip giant Qualcomm to consider a bid for BlackBerry.

The consortium, which was backed by Goldman Sachs Group Inc, was confident it could secure the necessary financing but found BlackBerry uncooperative in providing key information, including information on its government contracts and intellectual property portfolio, the people said, asking not to be identified as the negotiations were private.

"BlackBerry is confident that it has run a robust strategic alternatives review process. The board believes that the deal outlined today was the best proposal, and in the best interest of its shareholders," said a spokesman for BlackBerry.

However, sources familiar with BlackBerry's board's thinking on the matter said the board moved ahead on Watsa's financing proposal because Cerberus and its partners did not have a solid proposal with the required financing in place.

The sources stressed that all the strategic and financial players that delved into the company's books were aware of the bid deadline, and that the board opted for the best deal put before it within the timetable laid out.

BlackBerry also named John Chen, credited with turning around a US software company Sybase Inc in the late 1990s, as its interim CEO and executive chairman.

Chen's appointment was a surprise to investors as was the departure of current CEO Thorsten Heins, who will leave in about two weeks after the debt offering is completed. The company gave no reasons for the change.

In an interview with Reuters, Chen stressed his experience as a turnaround artist, and said he has no interest in shutting BlackBerry's loss-making handset business.

BlackBerry, based in Waterloo, Ontario, pioneered on-the-go e-mail, and for years its pagers and phones were must-have devices for political and business leaders. But it has bled market share to Apple Inc's iPhone and devices that are powered by Google Inc's Android software.

Its shares closed 16 percent lower at $6.50 per share.