On March 30, BlackBerry has reported Q4 and FY21 results/call AH. At first the market didn't like it and on the next trading day the stock lost 10% (panic mode, loss porn and so on). However within the next 2 trading days BB has regained all its $ in a quick reversal. I'm here to tell you why.
This is a followup to my OP.
^(Quick note to the Mods: I believe my OP is about to bring new original content to the discussion and hopefully will be eligible to live its life as a post.)
Portfolio Patent Sale (big $$$)
Quick refresh: the stock fell because the revenue came below expectations but straightaway the company said it happened because they are currently negotiating the sale of a portion of their patents specifically related to mobile devices, messaging and wireless networking. Consequently they had to voluntarily limit the monetisation of these patents during Q4.
The points I would like to investigate are: for how much $$ this sale could go, how likely this sale is to happen, who could be the buyer and when could it be completed?
First the money. CEO Chen during the call: we will report a one-time gain of a reasonably big number, followed by a tail of up to seven years. He also confirmed the yearly revenues for Licensing are around $250m. And that BB owns 38,000 patents. I will simply use these numbers with a DCF to estimate what that "big number" could be. Before I proceed I would like to emphasise that CEO also said: we believe that the completion of the transaction will be beneficial to our shareholders (if it happens).
Assuming a 10% discount rate and 7 years of revenue life, we have $250m current year, $227m next year, $207m (...) to $141m for the final year. For a total of $1,339bn. That's quite a pleasing big number but let's be careful nonetheless: we don't know the size of the portfolio being negotiated and the payment is expected to be initially a lump sum + 7years of tail royalties. So they could tweak it a bit.
With a 15% discount rate we get $1,196bn and at 20% $1,081bn. Another way to look at it: if we consider that they would sell only 75% of that side business and we discount it at 10% we still get a number north of a billion $ (consistent with CEO comment: it's a major portion of our portfolio). So money wise should the sale indeed happen we are looking at an one time cash flow of $1bn to $1.3bn. Not too shabby for a $5bn market cap company with already $800m cash in its hands (yes they could have momentarily circa 40% cash to mkt cap ratio).
Is this really happening? There is a high probability it would maybe 80% but it's not cleared yet. To get to this conclusion I listened twice to the conf call to try to decipher the clues. Whenever CEO was talking about the amount he sounded as if that part was near completion (will be a big number and the majority of the deal will come in one-time early, but there is a tail that goes on). Although he also stated that the company has not yet reached a definitive binding agreement and negotiations are ongoing.
The main hurdle might be the regulatory review of the transaction as the big boss mentioned that in the most conservative scenario: we assume that negotiation and regulatory review continue for the first half (of FY). A sentence that directly leads me to believe that the buyer could be a major company.
Big money buyer: if there is a lengthy regulatory review it might be because the potential purchaser could be in a position to infringe antitrust laws (NB: antitrust laws were created by Congress to preserve competition among businesses and prevent any one business from dominating a single industry and building a monopoly).
Speculations are ongoing that the buyer could be Facebook. It's honestly hard to say but that's the name with the higher odds at t