South Korea's Samsung has approached BlackBerry about a possible $7.5bn takeover, according to reports
South Korea's Samsung is willing to pay $7.5bn for BlackBerry in order to gain access to its patent portfolio, Reuters claimed.
Samsung executives proposed an initial price range of $13.35 to $15.49 per share, a premium of 38pc to 60pc on BlackBerry's current price, at a meeting last week, Retuers added.
Canada's BlackBerry, whose shares rose 29.7pc to $12.59 following the report, said after US markets had closed that it “has not engaged in discussions with Samsung with respect to any possible offer to purchase BlackBerry”.
Samsung did not return calls for comment.
Last July John Chen, BlackBerry's chief executive, denied he had received takeover offers but admitted he was open to talks.
“I don’t have any offers on my desk,” Mr Chen told Bloomberg at the time. “If people would like to talk, I mean, talk is not an offer.”
BlackBerry hopes its latest handset, the Passport, released in September last year, will help stop steadily sliding revenues. The smartphone combines BlackBerry’s characteristic “qwerty” keyboard with touch-screen technology. The handset is square in shape, and has impressed reviewers as being well-designed for reading and editing.
Last month the company reported a small profit for the third quarter, excluding one-off items, of $6m, or one cent a share. This was a slight improvement on the two-cent loss announced in the second quarter, and easily beat the five-cent loss expected by analysts.
However, revenues fell from $793m from $1.19bn a year earlier, missing analyst expectations of $931.53m.
BlackBerry announced it held $3.1bn in cash as of November 29, up $43m on the second quarter.
Mr Chen, who has been trying to turn around the once competitive mobile phone maker since he took on the top job in November 2013, said last month: "We achieved a key milestone in our eight quarter plan with positive cash flow. We also attained another important milestone in the release of our new enterprise software products and devices."
The firm, founded as Research In Motion in 1984, once accounted for more than half of the smartphone market, thanks to its robust devices with their “qwerty” keyboards. However, it was late introducing touch-screen mobiles, and its market share slumped to just 1pc amid intensifying competition from Apple and Samsung.
ComScore revealed in October that BlackBerry's market share had dropped below Microsoft's Windows phone, with just 2.3pc of smartphone subscribers.
Many analysts thought BlackBerry would stop producing handsets under Mr Chen’s guidance, but he said it will continue making the gadgets, as 46pc of the company's revenue still comes from this part of the business. Another 46pc of revenues comes from services and about 8pc from software and other products.
BlackBerry's Messenger was one of the most widely-used messaging services, with 85m active users, before it opened the service up to its rivals. It is now marketed as a secure communications tool for government agencies and regulated sectors, such as financial services. It then rolled out BBM Protected, a secure messaging service tailored specifically to the needs of companies in regulated sectors.
Mr Chen said the firm will focus on the company’s traditional areas of strength – namely its security and mobile device management services.
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