The Wall Street Journal has reported that Mike Lazaridis, former Co-CEO of Research in Motion, is near an agreement with Cerberus Capital Management to enter the ring with a bid that can potentially open up the playing field for the bid on BlackBerry. Not only will Lazaridis be joining Cerberus, Doug Fregin – one of the original and not very well known co-founders of Research in Motion – will also be entering the joint bid for the company.Â
This is very interesting news as November 4th follows a weekend and BlackBerry must decide what it wants to do with the Fairfax Financial bid by that time. This is the second bid to reach a more serious level than the rest of the interest for BlackBerry and has a lot of potential fire power. Joining Cerberus gives Lazaridis and Fregin more capital to throw into the ring as well as a more uniform approach toward saving the company as it stands without breaking it up into bits and selling it off. Sources do clearly state, however, that a bid may not be submit by Lazaridis, Fregin, and Cerberus after all is said and done.
Owning roughly 8% between the two of them, Lazaridis and Fregin hold enough weight in the company to use the equity they currently possess – as Fairfax is doing with their close to 10% held by Prem Watsa and co. – to sweeten the pot and use less capital (or even more in this case) to win the company back from the hands of current CEO, Thorsten Heins.
We have been following the story closely, and we know what this means. The competition can potentially be ruled out of this race if this bid is submit and approved. Many speculate that the group may offer less than Fairfax due to trading has lowered share prices of BlackBerry over the past few weeks to just under $8US. We are under the impression that the process will take quite some time to unfold and reach a conclusion if the bidding processes encounters even more competition after this announcement – so expect an exciting ride to come in the very near future.
Source: WSJ