By Rex Crum, MarketWatch
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Shares of BlackBerry Ltd. fell
sharply Monday, as the troubled smartphone company called off plans
to sell itself and replaced Chief Executive Thorsten Heins.
BlackBerry (RIMM) shares tumbled more than 16%, to close at
$6.50 after the company said a deal to sell itself to a major
shareholder, Fairfax Financial Holdings, had fallen through.
Instead, BlackBerry said it will sell $1 billion worth of
convertible bonds to Fairfax and other investors. BlackBerry also
said it has replaced Heins as CEO with former Sybase CEO John
Chen.
Fairfax had until Monday to finalize the financing of a $4.7
billion deal to acquire BlackBerry. No other bidders stepped up
with a counteroffer for the Canadian smartphone company.
In addition to BlackBerry, declines also came from Amazon.com
Inc. (AMZN), Facebook Inc. (FB), Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) and
Pandora Media Inc. (P).
However, the majority of the tech sector put in an upbeat
performance Monday, as the Nasdaq Composite Index (RIXF) rose 14.55
points to end at 3,936.59, while the Philadelphia Semiconductor
Index (SOX) closed with a small loss.
Groupon Inc. (GRPN) shares climbed 6.4% to close at $10.57. The
company's quarterly results are due after Thursday's market
close.
Gains also came from Apple Inc. (AAPL), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT),
Yahoo Inc. (YHOO), Netflix Inc. (NFLX) and IBM Corp. (IBM).
IBM rose $1.04 a share to end the day at $180.27. On Monday,
Twitter (TWTR) said in an updated IPO filing that IBM has accused
it of infringing on several IBM patents including some "related to
the efficient retrieval uniform resource locators."
(IBM)For its part, Twitter raised the price range on its IPO to
between $23 and $25 a share, after earlier expecting an IPO price
range of $17 to $20 a share. Twitter is expected to price its IPO
on Wednesday and begin trading on Thursday.
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