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商界风云，上周五，黑莓眼睁睁地看着自己的股价大跌17%而束手无策，与此同时，该公司还宣布预计第二季度净运营亏损最多可达10亿美元，而且还计划裁员约40%。这家曾经是企业移动计算市场霸主的加拿大科技公司在2008年夏天的市值还接近820亿美元，而当时苹果iPhone已经上市销售近一年时间，现如今，惹人唏嘘！今天的文章是按事件发生顺序编排嗒，首先是放出消息，观察员评论，然后就真的卖了，越障选了一篇分析类的，大家enjoy~
Part I: Speaker
Article 1:
The End Of Buttons: The New Gesture-Control Era
[Rephrase 1]
[Dialog, 2:31]
Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/08/19/213469564/the-end-of-buttons-the-new-gesture-control-era
Part II: Speed Article 2: BlackBerry layoffs could portend a sale
[Time 2]
SAN FRANCISCO — Massive layoffs of thousands at BlackBerry, reported in the works, move forward the likelihood of a company sale.
BlackBerry is planning layoffs of up to 40% of its workforce by year's end, according to The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter. The move is said to affect thousands of workers across all departments.
USA TODAY could not confirm the report.
BlackBerry has failed to rejuvenate its business despite relaunching its smartphone line and software in January. The company's downward spiral last month led it to explore strategic options that include a sale. Those prospects grow more likely in the wake of whopping employee cutbacks, say analysts.
BlackBerry shares slipped 1.5% to $10.40 in trading Wednesday.
"All the signs are that the company is making itself attractive to a buyer," says Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi.
Troubled BlackBerry had 12,700 employees in its most recent reporting period. The smartphone maker slashed 5,000 jobs last year.
BlackBerry had no comment.
BlackBerry's accelerated sale prospects — expected as soon as November, according to the Journal — underscores an industry turned upside-down. Just ask Nokia. Microsoft snatched up Nokia for $7.2 billion this month after both had failed to jump-start their mobile businesses.
The moves highlight consolidation around Google's Android and Apple's iOS software.
BlackBerry has struggled to woo consumers with it BlackBerry 10 software that underpins its new Z10 — which sports a full touch-screen — and the Q10, with its physical keyboard.
The company recently slipped below Microsoft in worldwide sales. Fourth-ranked BlackBerry holds just 2.7% of the smartphone market compared with Microsoft Windows at 3.3%, Apple iOS at 14.2% and Google's Android with 79%, according to researcher Gartner.
"They (BlackBerry) were overtaken by Windows," says Milanesi.
[285 words]
Source: http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/09/18/blackberry-cutting-jobs/2832933/
Article 3: Why BlackBerry Needs a Sale Sooner, Not Later
[Time 3]
There are 4,500 soon-to-be-unemployed BlackBerry staffers who know better than anyone the pain the Canadian mobile maker is going through. For the approximately 7,000 who will still be working there, the big question is how much longer the company can sustain itself.
There are different ways to look at that question, but here’s one particularly urgent factor: How much cash does it have left to burn through before simply running out of money to pay the bills?
The answer is about 16 months worth, if the way it lost money in the last three months continues. When it reported results for the quarter ending on June 1, the company said it had $3.1 billion in cash and investments. By the end of August, according to the announcement today, that had been whittled down to $2.6 billion.
That implies the company is burning through half a billion dollars of cash every three months. If it keeps going at that pace, it has until sometime around November 2014 until the $2.6 billion it has left runs out completely.
[176 words]
[Time 4]
Obviously a big part of what BlackBerry announced it would do today is aimed at slowing down the pace of that cash burn: Drastic employee cuts, reducing the number of devices it is selling, and aiming for an overall 50% reduction in operating costs by next June. The company also said it is moving away from the consumer market to focus on business customers, which presumably means lower marketing and advertising expenses.
At the same time, that kind of cutting can itself contribute to dwindling cash, because firing 4,500 people will involve short-term costs, and trimming back the business can also mean trimming back the revenues it generates. It’s not called a death spiral for nothing.
But even in the gloomiest scenarios, BlackBerry has no debt, and some assets worth real money. On top of $2.6 billion in cash, the company has a patent portfolio that Scotiabank estimates is worth at least $2.25 billion, based on a conservative valuation method. BlackBerry has been one of the busiest patent filers in the mobile business over the last decade:
Someone’s going to want to buy those patents. And BlackBerry still has 70 million subscribers around the world, and a huge base of large corporations running its enterprise-grade software to power their mobile email systems. That’s not something you can build overnight, and should be able to attract some eager bidders.
The question is when. And looking at the cash burn rate revealed today, it needs to be soon.
[248 words]
Source: http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2013/09/20/why-blackberry-needs-a-sale-sooner-not-later/?KEYWORDS=blackberry
Article 4: BlackBerry plans to go private
[Time 5]
BlackBerry's largest shareholder, Canadian insurance company Fairfax Financial, hopes to buy the smartphone maker for $9 per share.
That's an extremely low premium for a once-dominant company. Prior to the announcement on Monday, BlackBerry was trading at $8.24 per share. As recently as Friday, BlackBerry shares were trading at more than $10.
But shareholders were skeptical that Fairfax's deal could even go through: Shares of BlackBerry traded slightly below the amount that Fairfax was offering on Monday.
The proposed deal comes just three days after BlackBerry announced a brutal preliminary quarterly financial report, including a $1 billion loss for last quarter and plans to lay off about 4,500 staffers.
And so Fairfax, which already owns about a 10% stake in BlackBerry, is a possible white knight for a company that sorely needs one. Fairfax CEO Prem Watsa said the deal "will open an exciting new private chapter for BlackBerry," and that it will "deliver immediate value to shareholders."
Given BlackBerry's struggles, the go-private offer came along rather quickly. It's been just one month since BlackBerry said its board of directors had formed a special committee to look into "strategic alternatives" for the company -- including a possible sale. (As part of that announcement, Watsa stepped down from his board position to avoid "potential conflicts.")
The Fairfax offer isn't a done deal, however. BlackBerry chairwoman Barbara Stymiest said the company would consider "superior" deals, and the company has until Nov. 4 to find a better offer before proposing Fairfax's plan to shareholders.
[251 words]
[Time 6]
If BlackBerry does receive multiple offers, a bidding war could break out. Late Friday, the New York Times posted a report saying BlackBerry co-founder and former co-CEO Mike Lazaridis had approached private-equity firms about making an offer for the company.
If the Fairfax deal goes through, it will likely be a big relief for BlackBerry -- and a big challenge for Fairfax.
BlackBerry said on Friday that it would give up on consumers and redouble its efforts on winning over corporate customers -- a sentiment that Watsa echoed on Monday. But BlackBerry has recently struggled in corporate market too.
Companies have been increasingly willing to let employees work on phones they choose -- a phenomenon known as Bring Your Own Device. Those employees are overwhelmingly selecting iPhones and Android smartphones.
Meanwhile, BlackBerry rivals Apple, Google and Microsoft have worked hard to improve their security and e-mail delivery capabilities. As a result, corporate IT departments have opened their once-restrictive gates to non-BlackBerry devices.
Blackberry 10, the operating system that was meant to save the company, was delayed several times. So were the phones built around the new platform, which left BlackBerry customers with no new phones to buy. BlackBerry 10 finally launched in January, but sales of the new phones running on the platform have sorely disappointed.
[216 words]
Source: http://money.cnn.com/2013/09/23/technology/mobile/blackberry-private/
Part III: Obstacle
Article 5:
The End of RIM: How BlackBerry Crumbled [Paraphrase 7]
This is what a company circling the drain looks like: Research in Motion (RIMM) has officially hired JP Morgan Securities and RBC Capital to advise it on its previously announced “strategic review” of its business. While the company’s CEO, Thorsten Heins, described the role of these advisors in a jargon-laden statement yesterday as evaluating “the relative merits and feasibility of various financial strategies, including opportunities to leverage the BlackBerry platform through partnerships, licensing opportunities and strategic business model alternatives," the market-speak really translates as “we’re in dire straits and may end up selling part of the business.”
That would be a depressing conclusion to RIM’s saga, which saw a tiny Canadian startup become an icon of the Internet age – its Blackberry phone/e-mail devices were so ubiquitous that they were dubbed “Crackberries.” In the pre-Twitter era, one BlackBerry owner gave the world a taste of what was to come when he carried his device into the delivery room when his pregnant wife was about to give birth, and sent out e-mail updates every few minutes. In the year or two after the 1999 launch of the BlackBerry, long before the advent of the smartphones, possession of the device was a hallmark of status within the corporate world. And the BlackBerry network was secure enough for government use.
But as e-mail has given way to texts and tweets, so the Blackberry lost that cachet – or rather, it forfeited it to the iPhone, Android phones and tablets. After all, the Blackberry wasn’t a multi-purpose device of the same scope as a smartphone. You couldn’t use it to read a book; watch a movie; play Angry Birds.
And as with so many other once-pioneering technology firms, RIM failed to anticipate the advent of Apple’s (AAPL) iPad and, once the latter was launched, failed to respond promptly enough with a competitive product. By the time it introduced its PlayBook tablet to the market a year ago, it was too little, too late; reviews were underwhelming and sales ho-hum, at best. Within months, signs of distress at RIM were evident, as the company axed more than 10 percent of its workforce. A massive outage last October was simply the icing on the cake for many Blackberry customers; RIM’s new smartphones weren’t fashion-forward enough to compensate for being without service. Its market share has plunged from more than 40 percent to about 10 percent of all smartphones, by some calculations. Last year, it took a big writedown on the value of unsold PlayBooks; it wrote down the value of a large stockpile of unsold Blackberry devices last quarter.
Admittedly, the release issued yesterday – which also included a warning that the company expects to report an operating loss for its current fiscal quarter – didn’t state specifically that RIM, with its vast portfolio of alluring patents, is up for sale. But that’s the gist of the company’s pronouncement: It has served formal notice to its shareholders that it can’t complete a strategic turnaround on its own. The declaration that RIM has hired bankers is a de facto invitation for interested bidders to step forward. Once bids – solicited or unsolicited – are made to the board, it will be hard for directors to argue that shareholders should reject them. What’s the alternative scenario? What other option can they point to?
So what lies ahead for RIM? Odds are that it’s the patents, rather than the company’s operations, that will be of most interest to any bidders. The company’s market capitalization today stands at about $6 billion; last summer, analysts at investment bank Jefferies & Co. calculated the company had invested about $5 billion in patents that might fetch at least double that if a bidder like Apple saw an opportunity to pick them up cheaply, or quadruple that in a competitive bidding situation or one where a company decides to fork over the same kind of premium that Google (GOOG) did when it agreed to acquire Motorola Mobility last year for $12.5 billion.
RIM’s slow progress toward the brink of disaster is yet another reminder that the pace of technological change leaves no room for sentiment. Sony’s (SNE) iconic Walkman of the 1980s was replaced by the Discman, as compact discs replaced LPs and cassette tapes; the advent of downloadable digital audio quickly banished both to the same realm inhabited by the 8-track music tape player, video cassette recorders and rotary dial telephones. There is no reason why the Blackberry, long since displaced by the iPhone and other smartphones, shouldn’t join them in oblivion given RIM’s unsuccessful struggle to win back its status as an industry pioneer.
In after-hours trading, RIM’s shares dropped 7 percent; those losses have grown larger today. True, the company trades at a mere 5.2 times its trailing 12-month earnings, but for investors to see it as a deep value buy, they have to be convinced that there is some value in the company itself, and not just its patent portfolio.
Source: http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2012/05/30/The-End-of-RIM-How-BlackBerry-Crumbled
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发表于 2013-9-25 23:45:48
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开始还想提醒你去补昨天的作业呐，一刷新就看到你做了呢，真巧
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