As BlackBerry is doing their due diligence for finding another bidder or like most would say “shopping around”, Prem Watsa has stated a number of times he is confident his company’s bid will succeed, while we are not totally sure what lies ahead for BlackBerry, Prem Watsa spoke with The Globe and Mail to give us a solid update and understanding of what’s at stake.
Yes, we all know there are currently some problems with how the company has evolved, some say management, others marketing but Prem Watsa sees a future for “better days” with BlackBerry.
“It’s a good company, it’s a good product. Otherwise nothing could help it,” he says. “Can it compete in the consumer market with Apple and Samsung and the Android? No, we think that’s very tough. But in the enterprise market they’ve got huge advantages.”
As far as the bad BlackBerry press, here is what Prem had to say:
“If you read the press and you read these analysts, it looks like [BlackBerry] is going bankrupt. And five years ago it looked like RIM controlled the world. And both views are wrong. It wasn’t one, we found out, and we’re suggesting to you with humility that the second one is wrong.“
Mr. Watsa also understands customers point of view as we are not sure what the future holds, Prem says “once the deal is done customers will feel more confident”.
“What we’re doing here is simply doing our due diligence to figure out what’s needed to finance it over the long term, and then raising the money to have a capital structure that will help the company over the long term,” Mr. Watsa says, adding that the company won’t have too much debt.
“We want BlackBerry to survive for a long time,” he says. “Which means that it needs to have a very sound capital structure, and we’re going to focus on making sure that that takes place.”
Clearly, he is in it for the long haul, enterprise will be a focal point as far as consumers go, it looks like the BlackBerry community has taken it upon themselves to bring those big name apps by developing major 3rd party replacement apps such as Instagram and Vine (currently in development), what BlackBerry decides to do on the consumer end, we won’t really know until November 4th.