That BlackBerry isn’t having a purple patch is no secret. Late last year, it was believed that Chinese company Lenovo would take over the Canadian OEM, but that did not happen.
If we’re hearing right, a trio of Chinese companies — Xiaomi, Huawei and Lenovo — is giving a BlackBerry takeover another shot. Apart from this trio, software juggernaut Microsoft too is being tipped as a potential investor in the company.
We can’t say for sure how much truth there is to this story. One possible angle of looking at it would be: Xiaomi and other Chinese OEMs here are anyway looking to get some headway into the Western market, which in all senses, is yet to be exploited by them. An investment in/takeover of BlackBerry would give them just that.
What is stopping a lot of Chinese companies from entering the Western markets are the stringent laws, which are usually bent in favour of homegrown firms back in China.
Whether or not this takeover happens, Xiaomi, for one, have left a strong hint of their intentions to enter the US/UE markets by starting to ship accessories (no patent issues here) to these markets.
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Blackberry is only about their services and patents, the hardware has no value now, they sell too little to matter. Huawei or Lenovo sell 15- 20 times more phones in a quarter now and the gap is only increasing.
If I had to guess I would agree with realjjj this isn’t about the Blackberry hardware this is about two things: their software (most notably BBM) and more importantly their list of patents. According to WSJ from 2003-2011 they filed the 3rd most patents behind Ericsson and Apple.