BlackBerry Mulls Going Private

There’s a report in The Globe And Mail this morning that suggests that BlackBerry is considering going private:

Chief Executive Thorsten Heins and the company’s board is increasingly coming around to the idea that taking BlackBerry private would give them breathing room to fix its problems out of the public eye, the sources said.

“There is a change of tone on the board,” one of the sources said on Thursday.

The company’s shares jumped more than 8 per cent in pre-market action Friday following the report.

That is a good idea as public companies are always forced to consider their stock value and value to shareholders above all else. Thus going private would better enable the company to re-invent itself. Or so the theory goes. There’s a plot twist though:

Waterloo, Ont.-based BlackBerry has recently had discussions with private equity firm Silver Lake Partners about potential collaboration in enterprise computing, one of the sources said.

That’s the same Silver Lake that is trying to take Dell private. Look how well that’s working out. If this rumor is true, one can only hope the name Carl Ichan doesn’t enter the discussion as well. Though it would give me something to write about.

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