Last week BlackBerry was looking for "strategic alternatives". Now one has appeared: Fairfax Financial, with a 10% stake already, wants to buy the ailing smartphone maker for $4.7bn, or $9 a share.
That would be a miserable outcome for long-standing investors who were looking at a share price of $90 four years ago. But the current management seems to be out of ideas and out of touch (witness the excruciating saga of ordering a new corporate jet just ahead of announcing 4,500 job losses) so anyone who thinks they can do better is entitled to make a pitch.
Fairfax is muttering about a concentration on "superior and secure enterprise solutions". If that means focusing on business customers, the ambition sounds reasonable. But the same could have been said two or three years ago. The question is whether the cavalry has arrived too late to make a difference.
