RIM Bankrupt? How The Story Might End In Chapter 7

How much money it costs the company remains to be seen. But of that $2.2 billion in cash that it has on its book, it can possibly see a considerable amount of it erode. Since its earnings announcement, the company has received five downgrades including a $5 price target by a research analyst at Jeffries Group, according to dailypolitical.com.

This target supports what I have been speculating for quite some time, which is whether a RIM buyout arrive before its falls below $5.

Takeover Candidates

Whenever talks of acquisitions come up so do the usual suspects. However, I continue to be a huge supporter of the idea that Microsoft(MSFT) will come in and close the deal. It make too much sense for it not to happen. The companies have common enemies in Apple and Google. Besides, Microsoft, mired in smartphone disappointments of its own, has not been able to leverage its partnership with another struggling device maker, Nokia(NOK) .

I've said this previously -- with a RIM acquisition, Microsoft would only need to invest another few hundreds of dollars per user towards RIM's existing larger subscriber base and offer replacement phones based on the Windows Mobile operating system. It can then retain the BlackBerry email service as well as the popular BBM messenger service. This has the potential to quadruple its Windows smartphone user base and instantly make it a power among the ranks of Apple and Google.

The other possible candidates that nobody seems to be discussing, in my opinion, are Cisco(CSCO) and International Business Machines(IBM) .

Mostly it's for the same synergistic reasons as would be presented to Microsoft. By virtue of their strong enterprise and corporate presence, both firms would be able to couple their existing offerings such as networking and servers with RIM's yet significant enterprise footprint with its BlackBerry email service as well as its new Mobil Fusion service. I think both IBM and Cisco has the management expertise in place to squeeze any amount of value RIM still has left.