A new chapter begins in BlackBerry’s exit from the mobile phone market. This time it seems that the equipment manufacturer has really decided to leave the world of smartphones. The Canadian manufacturer has just assigned its latest mobile phone patents for 600 million dollars (530 million euros) to Catapult IP Innovations. Now remains at know how this new buyer will be able to monetize these patents.
BlackBerry sells its patents for $600 million
BlackBerry has therefore just sold the patents relating to mobile devices, messaging and wireless networks. These are patents relating to smartphones manufactured by the manufacturer, QWERTY keyboards and BlackBerry Messenger (BBM). The Canadian manufacturer is a veteran of “smartphone patent wars”. Since 1984, when the company was founded, BlackBerry has faced numerous patent disputes, notably against Handspring and Good Technology in the early 2000s and more recently against Facebook in 2018.
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Catapult IP Innovations is a new company, presumably created with the aim of buying the patents of the Canadian company, with a huge amount of debt, no proceeds, and no cash flow. Assuming the plan isn’t to go bankrupt instantly, the company is going to have to find a way to monetize BlackBerry’s patents somehow. She can start with sue all companies it believes are in breach of assets newly acquired.
The descent into hell of the Canadian manufacturer
Before the iPhone came to disrupt the market in 2007, BlackBerry was one of the main players in the mobile phone sector with Windows Mobile and Nokia. Canadian society did not know how to adapt to cope. Its touch-focused BlackBerry 10 operating system came much too late. The company therefore decided to abandon the development of the BlackBerry operating system in 2015 when it launched its first Android phone, the BlackBerry Priv.
In 2016, the Canadian manufacturer even decided to give up the development of telephone hardware, completely abandoning the smartphone sector. Diehards, who still own a BlackBerry OS device, lost access to BlackBerry servers in early 2022. In 2021, a company called OnwardMobility tried to take over the BlackBerry brand, promising to launch a phone a few months later. A promise postponed for a year, which should ultimately not succeed.