The company has announced that it has agreed to sell “substantially all” of those patents.
BlackBerry Ltd. recently announced that it has agreed to sell “substantially all” its smartphone business patents, for a total of USD$600 million.
The Canadian company recently announced that it was shutting down all support for its phones.
BlackBerry has now revealed that it was selling those smartphone business patents to Catapult IP Innovations Inc. That company is based in Delaware and is a special purpose firm formed for the sake of purchasing those assets. Catapult will be paying for the acquisition with a senior secured loan of $450 million on top of a promissory note for the remining amount. It has secured a second lien on the patents, payable in five installments. Those payments will begin three years after the deal’s closing date.
Third Eye Capital, based in Toronto, is financing the debt. Catapult has also secured $400 million in conditional commitments from a syndicate which includes a Canadian pension fund. That specific fund was not identified in the US Securities and Exchange Commission filing BlackBerry made for the sale.
The smartphone business patents were originally put up for sale by BlackBerry back in 2020.
The fact that BlackBerry chose to sell the patents hasn’t come as a surprise as they have been available for purchase for well over a year. That said, the news has arrived as Catapult decided to make the acquisition.
The patents Catapult has purchased from BlackBerry include intellectual property areas in which the Canadian then handset maker was an industry pioneer. That said, as the company is no longer working in that sector, it no longer requires the patents associated with it. These include mobile instant messaging and social collaboration tools.
At the time this article was written, BlackBerry hadn’t announced specifically how many of its 38,000 smartphone business patents were included in the transaction with Catapult. In December 2020, the company sold 90 of its patents to Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd, the tech giant from China. According to BlackBerry, the sale of the patents won’t have any impact on the ability of its customers to use its current solutions, products or services, such as in cybersecurity or power connected cars. The transaction is expected to close in seven months.
