BlackBerry (BB 2.73%) isn't the same company it was a decade ago, transitioning from a consumer electronics maker to an enterprise software and intellectual property play. It's also become a so-called "meme stock." But in this Fool Live clip, recorded on June 25, Fool.com contributor Matt Frankel, CFP, takes a closer look at BlackBerry to see if it might be worth a closer look for long-term investors.
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Matt Frankel: But BlackBerry, it's not the same BlackBerry you knew and loved 10 years ago. I don't know if you had a BlackBerry phone at any point. I certainly did. I thought it was the coolest thing I could type onto, something I can hold in my hand. When I got my first BlackBerry, it wasn't the normal the text where you're doing a little number pad. But BlackBerry has evolved as the company, they are still around. I think it became a meme stock because people were like "Wait, BlackBerry is still around?"
Blackberry is almost a $7 billion company still, believe it or not. They don't produce many consumer-facing things anymore, which is why a lot of people aren't too familiar with them anymore. They're up 80% year to date. They are the least shorted stock out of the six that I really researched deeply. Short interest is less than 9%, which is still elevated, but it's not meme stock-ish. They're mostly a licensing play these days, they produce some software systems. Baidu is a big client of theirs. In conjunction with Amazon Web Services, they're producing a big platform for the electric vehicle industry that's really looking promising. I think I saw 23 out of the top 26 EV producers are interested in using this platform once it's up and running. When they first started to pivot, their biggest asset was all the intellectual property they have, that's really where most of their intrinsic value comes from. I don't even know how many countless patents they had at first.
But this is a serious business. They just missed earnings, which is if you've noticed, the stock is down today, that's why. They just reported their earnings yesterday, I believe. They missed earnings, but this is a very real business, big IP play. Maybe we should have included it in the EV hour with all their EV efforts going on, which is something that is really interesting to me about the company that I'd like to dig into even further. That's BlackBerry. I ranked it my No. 5 out of this group of 10, or out of the 11 including cash, and this was Anand's No. 7. We both ranked this pretty much in the middle of the pack, a real business, but I guess nothing we're too excited about right now.
