RE:RE:Whats the PW move about? Regular business?And the stock still suffers with continued revenue drops and cylance bungle.
Yasch22 wrote: I saw there was a lot of noise about this at StockTwits.
Prem Watsa/Fairfax have owned two types of shares since 2013.
Going back to 2013, Watsa bought about 50m shares on the open market. His average cost (under debate) was either $13 or $17. i believe that's in Canadian dollars.
Then Watsa made a bid to own BlackBerry at $9/share US. His goal was to maintain BB as a going concern, and an attack on the gathering cloud of vulture capitalists, who were all mainly interested in acquiring the assets in order to sell off all or some of them.
Watsa converted the buyout plan into a company-saving plan where a new CEO was installed, backed by $1.25 billion USD in debentures. Fairfax owned $500m of that issue, convertible to shares at $10/share. In effect, Watsa gained effective control of another 50m shares.
That is, Fairfax/Watsa now controlled 50m common shares and another potential 50m via conversion from the debentures.
Shortly after that, he sold off several million of his privately held shares to reduce total effective control to somewhere around 17% of the total float at that time of ~530m shares.
Fairfax maintained control of 50m debenture shares when the $1.25b debenture issue was reduced to $605m about four years ago. When the debenture issue was reduced for a second time about a year ago, Fairfax ended up with control of about 55m shares ($330m convertible at $6 US per share).
Basically, Fairfax's effective ownership of BlackBerry has been almost exactly the same percentage for the past 8 years. Though it started off as a 9% stake, it grew to a bit more than 20% in November 2013, then dropped to ~17.5%, then threatened to rise to 20.5% in the most recent revision of the debentures, but settled out at 16.4%.
If anyone is using this issue to start up the old drumbeat about a selfish Watsa wanting to steal BlackBerry, pat them on the head and tell them to run along.