BlackBerries for the picking
What could it mean if Lenovo or another vendor really were to buy the troubled BlackBerry marque? Larry Walsh speculates
Excitement has been building around BlackBerry, although it may not have much to do with the forthcoming debut of the Z10 smartphone or anything done by the new creative director, singer Alicia Keys. Rather, speculation has been developing that Lenovo could buy the troubled Canadian handset company.
In an interview with French newspaper Les Echos, Lenovo chief executive Yang Yuanqing said a deal with BlackBerry could make sense if the financials and market conditions were right.
Lenovo is already a top smartphone manufacturer in its home market, China, and pushing new products and developments in servers, tablets and storage. It has teamed up with EMC and Iomega to develop new storage products. And it's partnering with Google on Chromebooks for the education market.
The company has made no bones about its ambition to diversify.
"External growth remains a question of opportunities," said Yang (pictured, right) in the interview, according to a Bloomberg report.
BlackBerry, formerly known as Research In Motion, has been struggling to survive. After bleeding market share for the last four years, the company over the last 12 months undertook a sweeping restructuring in parallel with its development of BlackBerry 10, and its new OS and enterprise control platforms.
The new products, Z10 and Q10, are re-imagined products from a company that essentially helped create the smartphone market.
BlackBerry is also a pioneer of bringing smartphones to the channel. It works with distributors such as Tech Data and Ingram Micro to push handsets, carrier services and enterprise management platforms to resellers.
Other smartphone manufacturers don't sell smartphones through the B2B channel so much, mainly mobile device management (MDM) and applications.
A Lenovo-Blackberry marriage could be an interesting competitive shift in the computing landscape, especially if mobile platforms such as tablets and smartphones are proving more valuable than traditional PCs.
HP and Dell have each ventured into the smartphone market, only to retreat. HP said it is considering having another try. And recent Apple fortunes were built partly on the success of smartphones.
Meanwhile, Samsung is pushing its tablet and PC sales upwards via the success of its Galaxy smartphone line, and even Microsoft is rumoured to be developing a smartphone based on Windows Phone 8.
What could make a Lenovo takeover of BlackBerry even more interesting is the potential of pushing BlackBerry 10 as a global OS. Several PC vendors are becoming disillusioned with Microsoft's dominance in the PC OS market and have, to a large degree, shunned Windows Phone 8 as a mobile platform.
Although BlackBerry failed to crack the tablet market with its Playbook, its underlying code could prove valuable in enabling other mobile devices.
This isn't the first time an acquisition of BlackBerry has been floated. At the height of BlackBerry's troubles, Microsoft was rumoured to be considering a stake in the company -- even a total buyout.
Microsoft spent some $1bn (£0.7bn) on Nokia-Siemens Networks to keep the Finnish phone firm afloat. Other tech companies have reportedly looked at BlackBerry as well, including IBM.
There's no telling whether Lenovo is serious, or if its chief executive was merely expressing a passing fancy. However, Yang's comments do reflect the established importance of mobile devices in the contemporary and future portfolios of hardware vendors.
As part of our special editorial partnership, CRN is publishing this recent article from Channelnomics.
**This article originally appeared on Channelnomics earlier this week. However, Lenovo has kindly provided CRN and Channelweb.co.uk with further clarification of the situation, which we paste below:
"Lenovo confirms that the company evaluates all growth opportunities on a regular basis. However to be very clear: an interview published by the French daily Les Echos on Monday 11 March outlined our approach to any potential M&A. We reiterate that there is not and has not been any specific evaluation or activity underway regarding Blackberry. We continue to focus on driving organic growth while at the same time, as we have stated many times in the past, we will consider M&A when it is aligned with our Protect and Attack strategy."