BlackBerry co-founder Jim Balsillie sells stake in company

Jim Balsillie, Research In Motion Ltd’s co-chief executive officer until January of last year, cut his last formal ties to a company he helped found 20 years ago when he reported yesterday that he no longer holds a stake. Balsillie disclosed owning zero shares in RIM as of December 31 in a US regulatory filing, down from 5.1 per cent a year ago. Investors who hold a stake in a company of less than 5 per cent aren’t required to report when they buy or sell the shares, according to Securities & Exchange Commission rules.

Balsillie had been the third-largest shareholder and helped lead the company during its heyday as a smartphone pioneer and market leader. He departed last year along with co-CEO Mike Lazaridis after fumbling product introductions and losing market share to Apple Inc’s iPhone and to Android devices. The company doesn’t comment on the holdings of individual shareholders, said Heidi Davidson, a spokeswoman for the Waterloo, Ontario-based company, said.

Balsillie also declined to comment when approached through his assistant and the company.

Balsillie may have benefited from the stock’s fourth-quarter rally before selling it. Optimism about the company’s new BlackBerry 10 lineup of phones fueled a 58 per cent stock rally in the period, rewarding investors after years of declines.

Since the January 30 unveiling of the new phones, concerns about a slow rollout in the US, BlackBerry’s biggest single market, have weighed on the stock. While the new Z10 model is already available in the UK, Canada and the United Arab Emirates, it won’t come to the US until next month.

Donald Yacktman’s $21-billion mutual-fund firm, once the smartphone maker’s fifth-largest holder, sold almost half its holdings in the weeks before the BlackBerry 10 debut.

“The dilemma in a company like this is that there are vast differences in outcome potential,” Yacktman said in an interview last week. The stock had gotten more expensive with no guarantee the new phones would succeed in turning the company around, he said.

After Balsillie’s disclosure yesterday, BlackBerry shares tumbled as much as 7.5 per cent. The stock later recovered and gained 7.7 per cent to $15.07.

Lazaridis, a fellow co-founder who invented the BlackBerry device itself, held 29.9 million shares as of December 31, according to a separate filing yesterday. That was an increase of about 200,000 shares from the end of the third quarter, and gives him a stake of 5.7 per cent in the company.

Balsillie, who has an MBA from Harvard University, teamed up with Lazaridis in 1992. Together, they introduced the BlackBerry “two-way pager” in 1999. Balsillie made early trips to New York and Washington to sell bankers, lawyers and government agencies on the device, building a loyal BlackBerry following in the process.

He was also credited with building relationships with carriers so that more than 200 wireless operators offered BlackBerry devices at its peak. More recently, he was criticised by shareholders such as Vic Alboini, who said his side interests had become too much of a distraction from day-to-day management of the company.

Balsillie tried and failed on three separate occasions to buy National Hockey League franchises — the Pittsburgh Penguins, Nashville Predators and Phoenix Coyotes.

Since resigning , Balsillie has made few public appearances. Communitech, a startup incubator in Waterloo, posted a video interview with Balsillie in November in which he discussed his time at RIM and his plans for the future.

“I’ve had my fair share of cold sweats over the tricky commercial issues over the decades,” Balsillie said, calling the job of running RIM “very demanding.” He said he planned to take the advice of others to not rush into anything, otherwise revealing little about future business plans.

“I would expect he’ll be back in the landscape,” said Gillis. “Give it a year.”