Now that foundering smartphone pioneer BlackBerry has put itself up for sale, will anyone buy it?

Anything’s possible, but the emerging consensus among analysts is that BlackBerry is unlikely to prove attractive takeover target.

Indeed, the company’s announcement Monday that it is exploring “strategic options” all but confirms that view. Certainly, it demonstrates a lack of interest in the $5.4 billion former smartphone pioneer; Presumably BlackBerry wouldn’t have to advertise for a buyer or partner if it weren’t having difficulty finding one.

But now that it is, analysts are at a loss to explain exactly who would want to buy BlackBerry outright and why.

“We struggle to see who might buy BlackBerry given the ongoing turnaround challenges,” Nomura’s Stuart Jeffrey writes. “Any bidder would likely have to be proficient in company turnarounds to generate value from a BlackBerry acquisition. Few companies in tech seem to have that skill set, with most focused on technology acquisitions only.”

Mike Walkley of Canaccord Genuity just doesn’t see it either. “… We struggle to identify potential buyers that would pay a premium to the current share price,” he said Monday.

What about Samsung, Lenovo, or Microsoft, three companies that have occasionally been fingered as possible BlackBerry acquirers in the past? Wells Fargo analyst Maynard Um suspects their names will likely pop up again in the months ahead, but doubts anything will come of it. “We expect many companies will take a look even though they may not all be truly interested bidders,” he wrote in a note to clients.

Sadly, that may well prove to be the case. BlackBerry’s precipitous downfall, mercilessly hurried along by Google and Apple, has left it with seemingly little opportunity for recovery and ever dwindling options for redemption. Much as the company’s leadership would like the world to view its announcement of a strategic review as yet another new beginning, it’s looking increasingly like one more chapter in the same sort of long, sad ending that felled Palm — another pioneer taken off guard by an industry disruption it recognized too late, and ruined by its own hubris.

BlackBerry best hope Prem Watsa’s Fairfax Financial pulls together that private equity buyout it’s working on. Otherwise, it may be headed for a piecemeal sale.

via AllThingsD » Mobile http://allthingsd.com/20130813/why-would-anyone-buy-blackberry-now/