Remember Blackberry?
Don’t worry … we don’t either. It’s been a swift and sudden fall for the smart phone maker – which was once enjoyed 70 percent of the domestic market and was valued at $80 billion. Today? Blackberry isn’t worth $5 billion – and its market share has plummeted below 5 percent.
Ouch, right?
Anyway Blackberry CEO Thorsten Heins – who infamously insisted there was “nothing wrong” with the company last year – isn’t sweating the collapse. Why not? Because he’s in line to make $55 million when it finally hits bottom – part of what appears to be a calculated plan to get him to steer the company directly into the ground (and into the arms of a prospective suitor).
Heins – who makes $10 million a year as it stands – was originally in line to receive $19 million from a Blackberry buyout. But that sum tripled recently (as Blackberry’s plunge approached terminal velocity). One of the people who helped secure this bailout for Heins? Former Blackberry board member Prem Watsa – who as fate would have it is the CEO of the company now acquiring Blackberry for a song.
Cozy, huh?
Yeah …
We don’t own shares in Blackberry (thank God). And to our knowledge American taxpayers haven’t been approached to bail the company out of its hole. So at the end of the day Heins’ $55 million parachute is somebody else’s problem.
Still it strikes us as an incredibly shady deal … one that should make anybody with a stake in Blackberry’s future positively irate.
3 comments
Blackberry is going to go the way of Blockbuster, and for the same reason: inability to keep up with the evolving market. Doesn’t help to have a vulture of a CEO who has no interest in helping it recover.
http://us.blackberry.com/smartphones.html#
I mean, tell me, do you see a phone you’d actually consider buying here?
Its not an inability. Its called the free market. Bb could have kept up easily. They chose not to by refusing to stay ‘hungry’ enough to compete.
“Blackberry”, always makes me think someone is referring to our Commander-in-Chief.