RIM Stock Shares Soar Powered by Rumors of Takeover

There may not be a smartphone company having a tougher year than RIM. Failure after failure, after weird scandal has followed the company. RIM’s main product is of course the Blackberry and the company hoped that its own BlackBerry (News - Alert) tablet would stem the tide of money that was pouring out of the company’s coffers. Unfortunately for RIM, the BlackBerry Playbook has been meant with quite a bit of derision and the company is on incredibly unstable ground.

Today it appears that good news has arrived for the company, despite the fact that it may be fleeting. On Wednesday afternoon, RIM’s stocks began to shoot through the roof on various reports saying that a major corporation was getting set to acquire the Canadian tech firm. Among the companies who were reported to be mulling a takeover were bigwigs like Microsoft and Nokia, though at the moment, no such purchase has taken place.

Another report has claimed that online retailer Amazon has also been trying to decide whether it was worth it to put a bid in on RIM. All of the talk of a company that is vastly more financially healthy than RIM purchasing the company has led to the Blackberry maker’s stock to rise seven percent over the previous day’s earnings. For its part, RIM is not talking about the takeover rumors, though the lack of confirmation or denials seems to be confirmation on its own. 

National Bank Financial analyst Kris Thompson doesn’t believe the rumors, saying that it would be a very bad time for any company to acquire RIM. While the company saw its stock soar over the last day, the stock is down by 80 percent over where it began in 2011. Thompson also said that he believes RIM has not hit rock bottom just yet and expects sales to continue to decline through 2012. 

Thompson believes that if one of the technological bigwigs were to buy RIM, it would most likely be when the company’s stock was even lower. “We expect the vultures to circle and to wait for a lower entry point,” Thompson concluded, noting that potential buyers “are few” and that valuing RIM’s intellectual property is “challenging.”