As we learned Thursday, Lenovo Group Lenovo Group, the Chinese consumer technology firm, has signed a non-disclosure agreement with BlackBerry in preparation for a bid to buy the struggling Canadian business.
Lenovo surely knows it will not be permitted to take over BlackBerry. Canadian and American authorities are expected to block any sale to a company subject to Beijing’s control, even if that control is only indirect, as it is in the case of Lenovo.
So why is Lenovo in the process of making a bid? In all probability, Chinese government officials want to destroy BlackBerry, just as they destroyed another Canadian tech company, Nortel Networks, last decade.
For almost a decade, the Chinese hacked Nortel, gaining access to nearly everything on its internal networks. As John Tkacik, a retired chief of China intelligence analysis at the State Department, told Forbes at the end of last week, “Not surprisingly, throughout the 2000s, as Nortel’s networks were wholly accessible to Chinese hackers, the Canadian company found itself underbid by the Chinese in the Chinese market and by Chinese competitors in its traditional global markets.” As a result, Nortel declared bankruptcy in 2009. The company was then split up and the parts sold off.
Read also:
Lenovo will face obstacles in any BlackBerry deal: source (Reuters)
Fixing BlackBerry Would Be Enormous Task for Lenovo (TIME)
Lenovo is looking into acquiring BlackBerry, says report (The Verge)
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