Lenovo had been actively pursuing its plans to takeover BlackBerry and had reportedly even signed an NDA with the company, but the Canadian Government rejected the idea of a Chinese company taking over BlackBerry citing national security concerns.
As a result the November 4 deadline passed without any takeover deal actually happening. According to The Globe and Mail report, Ottawa shuttered the talks between the two companies stating that “it would not approve a Chinese company buying a company deeply tied into Canada’s telecom infrastructure.”
BlackBerry processors petabytes of data traffic each month over its secure network that handles millions of encrypted messages from its customer base that includes even government agencies, public sector companies, businesses and Fortune 500 companies.
As the government didn’t even let such talks proceed, BlackBerry never sent out a formal proposal mentioning Lenovo as one of the interested party.
Earlier this week, BlackBerry announced that it abandoned its plans of selling itself and has instead accepted a US $1 billion financing from Fairfax led consortium.
Jan Dawson, Ovum chief telecoms analyst, said “If the Canadian government hadn’t nixed Lenovo’s BB bid, the US and UK governments almost certainly would have later in the process”, notes TechWeek Europe.
”If you think the kinds of people, companies and orgs that use BlackBerries would be comfortable with Chinese ownership you’re nuts,” Dawson added.
