A day after a report claimed that Samsung might snatch up struggling Canadian BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion, the South Korean electronics giant threw cold water on the story, saying no thanks.
“We haven’t considered acquiring the firm and are not interested in (buying RIM),” Samsung spokesman James Chung told Reuters news service, but not before RIM’s stock price took a 10-point bump off news of a possible buyout.
No Talks
Contrary to the Boy Genius Report tech blog story saying that RIM co-Chairman Jim Balsillie had approached Samsung and was eager to make a deal, Chung told Reuters the company had not been approached.
BGR cited unnamed sources in its report, and said previously that RIM was considering licensing its software to other developers. With a swarm of devices powered by Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS that command more market share than the BlackBerry fleet of devices, the most valuable property RIM has at its disposal seems to be its secure messaging system. BGR and others theorized that Samsung could conceivably use BlackBerry Messenger as a differentiator for some of the already top-selling Android-based devices it makes, such as the Galaxy Nexus and Galaxy SII.
But the asking price, cited as $ 10 billion to $ 15 billion, could be a sticking point in any deal, said Ken Dulaney, an analyst and vice president at Gartner.
“Samsung would like the patents and they could easily absorb the capacity and fulfilling demand,” said Dulaney. “But the [network operations centers] and other technologies would have to be sold off or die off since I don’t think Samsung would know what to do with them.”
He said the Samsung report never seemed credible.
RIM’s centralized network operations centers in Canada and the UK authenticate e-mails and route them to BlackBerry devices.
RIM is believed to be in the process of a management…
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