Earlier this week it was revealed that the deal for Fairfax Financial Holdings to buy up BlackBerry fell through, and that instead the firm would be investing $1 billion into the struggling smartphone maker, along with a group of other investors who went unnamed.
Now a filing has shed some more light on who else will be putting up the cash to bail out BlackBerry, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal on Thursday. It turns out it will be a mix of investors from America, Canada and Qatar.
The biggest investor in the deal will be Canso Investment Counsel, a privately held money manager based in Richmond Hill, Ontario. It will be putting $300 million into BlackBerry.
Another investor, Mackenzie Financial Corp., is putting in $200 million and, as Fairfax previously disclosed, it will be investing $250,000.
That leaves the remaining $250,000,000 to be split between Virginia-based Markel Corp, Toronto-based Brookfield Asset Management and Qatar Holding.
In addition to the funding news on Monday, BlackBerry also revealed that it was dumping its current CEO, Thornstein Heins. Heins will be replaced, at least temporarily, by former Sybase CEO Jon Chen, who will also be appointed as the Executive Chair of BlackBerry’s board of directors.
The filing has now also revealed how much the company will be paying Chen to take on these responsibilities.
His compensation package will include a base salary of $1 million, with the potential for a $2 million performance bonus. He will also be given 12 million restricted shares of BlackBerry, with the potential to be worth tens of millions of dollars.
Chen will retain the role of Chief Executive until the company can find a suitable replacement for Heins. Thorsten Heins became the CEO of Research in Motion (now BlackBerry) after the company’s co-CEOs, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, stepped down on January 23rd, 2012.
Fairfax had originally proposed to put together a consortium of investors to buy BlackBerry for $9 a share, which would have amounted to a $4.7 billion buyout.
BlackBerry accepted the offer but reports began to trickle in that the deal was in trouble. Fairfax, it seemed, was having trouble finding banks willing to put up the money.
So now that this deal current deal seems to be going smoother, does that mean that BlackBerry is in the clear? Hardly.
BlackBerry has to find a way to reverse some pretty dismal sales in the past couple of quarters.
In its second quarter earnings in September, BlackBerry revealed in September that it generated just $1.6 billion in revenue for the quarter. Analysts, meanwhile, were expecting about twice that—or $3.06 billion.
The cause of BlackBerry’s horrific second quarter: extremely low Z10 sales. All told, the company sold 5.9 million BlackBerry phones in the second quarter, but it only expects to recognize hardware revenue on 3.7 million phones.
By comparison, the company sold 6.8 million phones and generated $3.1 billion in revenue in Q1 2014.
A new CEO and an influx of cash will help, but they cannot fix all of the problems that BlackBerry has.
BlackBerry could not be reached for comment.
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