Yasch22 wrote: I didn't want to do a deep dive on this, but ran across a few articles on a late night ramble, and figured I'd share a nugget or two.
The two companies most often mentioned in the same RTOS (real time operating system) area as QNX are Green Hills and Wind River VXworks.
Green Hills is run by Dan O'Dowd, the guy who's been running full page attack ads on Tesla's full self-driving software, though looking kind of stupid and ineffective for doing so. Apparently he's ticked off that Elon Musk tried working with Green Hills about 7 years ago and called the sw "garbage".
GH had $89.7m in revenue in 2022.
https://getlatka.com/companies/green-hills-software-inc -- In 2019, GH sold 16% of its shares to Cadence for $150m.
Link. That translates to a value of $937.5m.
-- with inflation, that translated to about $1.05 billion in 2023.
-- Note: QNX's run-rate is roughly $204m. Think it's worth at least 2X what GH is worth?
Wind River was founded in 1983. (Wikipedia) It was sold to Intel in 2009 for $884m. I don't know off-hand what the revenue was.
[Note: a year later, Research in Motion bought QNX (annual revenue ~$30m) for about $200m.]
-- 2016. The Wind River division of Intel seems to be in a lot of turmoil. One of its leaders, Barry Mainz, leaves the company to lead MobileIron.
-- 2018. Intel decides to divest WR to -- hmmm! -- a leveraged buyout outfit named TPG. Terms undisclosed.
-- 2019: TPG finds out about the sale of 16% of Green Hills, and puts up WR for sale. Apparently, WR was generating something like $120m in EBITDA, so analysts figured TPG might get $1.5 billion in the sale.
-- Aptiv offered $4.3 billion (!) for WR in January 2022.
-- There were problems with regulatory authorities, so the parties said, and the final sale price was marked down to $3.5 billion.
Last note: BlackBerry's total EBITDA (for all divisions combined) has varied wildly this past decade. However, it has been quite healthy in 6 out of the past 9 years. But let's go with 2019, the year that there was so much interest in Green Hills and Wind River. BB's EBITDA in FY/19 was $209m USD.
Compare that to the $120m EBITDA for Wind River in 2019, leading ultimately to a sale price for $3.5 billion.
Link. You think BB might be worth $3.5b too? That's a full $1b above its present market cap.