For some years BlackBerry has not had a share in the cell phone market, now officially withdraws from the market being one of the first companies that became popular worldwide in the field of mobile devices.
The company will announce that it has sold its entire portfolio of telephony and messaging patents, abandoning any possibility of return. According to specialized media, the buyer is the company Catapult IP Innovations Inc which is based in Delaware, United States and is described as a «special purpose vehicle» formed to acquire BlackBerry creations.
The operation to obtain the intellectual property of the former technology company will be 600 million dollars, according to reports. This will include all patents for mobile devices, messaging services, wireless networks, i.e. everything related to BlackBerry phones, QWERTY keyboards and BlackBerry Messenger.
For its part, the ars Technica website detailed that Catapult IP Innovations will have to monetize BlackBerry’s patents in some way, since the firm that will acquire the intellectual property has debts and has no products or cash flow. Under this premise, analysts expect that Catapult’s plan to acquire the rights is intended to sue all services that may be violating the patents.
This isn’t new, as even BlackBerry did something similar in 2018, when it sued Messenger for allegedly violating ideas in the features of muting and displaying notifications as a numeric icon badge.
In social networks this movement was cataloged as «the end of an era» when recalling the sales capacity that BlackBerry once had. It is not unexpected, since January 4 the services of devices that operated with their own operating systems would stop working «reliably» leaving the call, data and messaging functions inactive.
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In 10 years, BlackBerry’s value plummeted 91.4%. In the mid-2000s the Canadian company had up to 25% of the smartphone market worldwide, reaching up to 45% in Latin America and the Caribbean; in contrast, data from 2016 shows that it had a market share equivalent to 0.0481%.
