A Bid For BlackBerry Ltd Possible But Unlikely: Lenovo

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BlackBerry is not a priority for Chinese PC manufacturer Lenovo, which also happens to be the world’s biggest PC maker. Over the past eight years, the company has made five major acquisitions.

Lenovo has other priorities

Aymar de Lencquesaing, Lenovo’s president of North American operations, told BNN that Lenovo is busy integrating last year’s purchases of IBM’s server unit and Motorola.

“With Motorola and our own Lenovo business, we’re number three in market share in the world and we have significant scale,” said de Lencquesaing.

An earlier report from the Globe and Mail claimed that BlackBerry and Lenovo talked about a possible deal in 2013, but Canada was against the deal as it involved a Chinese company. National security was one of the major concerns, which is why the authorities were against the deal.

However, de Lencquesaing says that Lenovo will not be deterred by national security concerns if it wants to buy BlackBerry or any other company, adding that there is no appropriate reason for hindering any acquisition the company makes in the future.

If Lenovo works on a BlackBerry acquisition, then it could help the Chinese company diversify from smartphones and the softening PC market. Lenovo’s enterprise segment, which was beefed up with the acquisition of the System X business from IBM, suffered a pre-tax loss of $45 million in the last quarter, while revenue came in at $1.1 billion.

Many interested in BlackBerry

Every now and then there have been rumors of major companies looking to buy BlackBerry, which has been struggling to regain its lost glory or at least gain a respectable share of the smartphone market. The recent turnaround efforts by the company and profit in the first quarter have supposedly spiked the interest of companies such as Xiaomi, Huawei, Lenovo and Microsoft. According to various reports, many tech firms are looking to buy BlackBerry, and Microsoft even requested that investment firms evaluate the potential of a deal.

A series of reports claimed that BlackBerry could cost somewhere around $7 billion. Though the value of the company largely depends on the market, a price of $7 billion would be high, even when compared to the amount Microsoft paid for Nokia’s device division. If Microsoft or any other company bids $7 billion, then it would like to buy the complete BlackBerry.

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