Nevertheless here's where I think we disagree:
* Inventory will have some liquidation value. Let's discount inventory by 75% which is pretty conservative; you will still get $200M here
* IP - Main disagreement for me is here. Most analysts who have pegged the IP at $2 - $3 bn. Let's put it at $2bn, the lower end of the spectrum [1][2]
6.2 + 2.2 - 3.7 + 2 = $6.7B (~40% above purchase price)
As we can see the main question is the value of the IP (and PPE to a lesser extent). I have absolutely no experience valuing patents, I'm not a patent lawyer, and definitely won't be evaluating their 9K+ patent applications. So unfortunately there's a pretty big unknown in the valuation.
Regardless we have a $4.7B - $6.7B range based on a very quick 15 minute analysis of their balance sheet with an upside of earnings of any profitable lines of business that can be operated independently (if they exist).
My guess is tha Prem Watsa, as former chairman of BBRY, has done a much more rigorous evaluation of their IP and found profitable business lines he wants to keep / spin-off to reach a comfortable margin of safety.
[1] http://money.cnn.com/2013/09/24/technology/enterprise/blackb...
[2] http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2013/08/26/the-n...
The value of IP isn't the only question. We also seem to disagree on how quickly value is evaporating! Blackberry sales are bound to decline faster and faster, like a waterfall -- similar to what happened to Nokia's smartphones.
After the introduction of iOS and Android in 2007-2008, Nokia's quarterly smartphone unit sales barely budged... at first... but then dropped by two-thirds between Q1 2010 and Q1 2012![1]
Liquidating a company of Blackberry's size would take at least two years. Any estimate of liquidation value should take into account the possibility of quarterly unit sales dropping by two-thirds in the near future.
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[1] http://www.dazeinfo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/post-15.b...
* Cash, short-term and long-term liquid investments, receivables, and assets held for sale totaled $6.0 billion. (I wouldn't dare put a dollar value on inventories, because their value declines at an accelerating pace, like a waterfall, due to the rapid pace of technological change.)
* Property plant & equipment (consisting mostly of land and buildings) totals $2.2 billion. Let's give them full credit for this figure.
* Total liabilities are $3.7 billion.
So, assuming you can liquidate the whole business quickly, the liquidation value of all tangible assets appears to be somewhere around $6.0 + $2.2 - $3.7 = $4.5 billion. However, the company is hemorrhaging money by the day and suffering from anti-network effects that can make revenues drop like a waterfall (instead of declining in a gentle slope), so this estimate may be optimistic. In a year, the figure could very well be down to $3.5 billion.
That leaves the value of intellectual property, carried on the books at $3.5 billion. Of that amount, $0.8 billion is the price paid for Blackberry's share of the Nortel patents[2]; the reminder consists primarily of all the Blackberry software they've developed in-house (that is, their proprietary OS and applications, built on top of QNX), which is valuable to third parties only to the extent they want to build a business around it. My (conservative) guess: this is worth a LOT less than $3.5 billion -- maybe ~$1 billion -- but I don't know for sure.[3]
At a proposed purchase price of $4.7 billion, the margin of safety looks very slim to me.
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[1] http://ca.blackberry.com/content/dam/bbCompany/Desktop/Globa...
[2] See the "Intangible Assets, Net" notes in http://press.blackberry.com/content/dam/rim/press/PDF/Financ...
[3] For reference, QNX -- the jewel in Blackberry's software portfolio -- has been sold twice over the past decade. Harman International bought it for $138 million in 1994, and then sold it to RIM for $200 million in 2010. These figures are rounding errors compared to $4.7 billion. Source: http://blog.vdcresearch.com/embedded_sw/2010/04/update-2-rim...