NOVEDADES EN RIMM

Comparto aquí un artículo en inglés donde muestra lo que sospechábamos en un post publicado hace días. Allí decíamos que alguien estaba tomando posición fuerte en esto y ello era muy notorio. El fondo de inversión Faifax Financial, dobló su posición en este empresa. Acá hay gato encerrado y más viniendo de dicho fondo que tiene muy buenos antecedentes como gestores de fondos.

Fairfax Financial doubles stake in BlackBerry maker RIM

By Sean B. Pasternak and Hugo Miller TORONTO — Fairfax Financial Holdings, the insurer run by Canadian investor Prem Watsa, doubled its stake in Research In Motion in a vote of confidence in the BlackBerry maker after Watsa joined the company's board. Fairfax owns 26.85 million RIM shares, up from 11.8 million shares in September, according to a regulatory filing Friday. The company raised its stake to 5.12 percent, worth about $437 million based on Thursday's closing price. Watsa was named a RIM director on Jan. 22 as part of a management shakeup that included the replacement of co-Chief Executive Officers Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis with former operating chief Thorsten Heins. The company is rebuilding its product line to try to stem recent market share losses to Apple Inc.'s iPhone and devices that run on Google's Android platform. "This is a vote of confidence in the current trajectory of the company or he thinks that there's some value here that can be unearthed," said Adnaan Ahmad, an analyst at Berenberg Bank in London. "Watsa is extremely well-respected, kind of like the Warren Buffett of Canada, so the bottom line is that the stock today should be up on the back of this." RIM's share of the smartphone market tumbled to 11 percent in the third quarter of 2011, from 21 percent two years earlier, according to Gartner. The largest shareholder in RIM is Primecap Management Co., with a 5.5 percent stake, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Lazaridis has a 5.4 percent stake in the company and Balsillie owns 5.1 percent. "This is a huge psychological boost," said Ian Nakamoto, director of research at MacDougall MacDougall and MacTier in Toronto. Fairfax has said RIM is an attractive investment because the company is trading at less than book value with free cash flow, yet still has a growing subscriber base and increases in revenue. The stock purchases were made by Watsa, Fairfax and about a dozen of the Toronto-based company's subsidiaries. Fairfax bought 6.5 million shares Wednesday and another 7.6 million shares Thursday, so the company spent about $230 million buying RIM shares in two days. Watsa has built Fairfax by investing in the assets of out-of-favor securities. Watsa founded Fairfax in 1985 and has patterned his style of value investing after Warren Buffett, recommending shares of companies such as Wells Fargo, Johnson & Johnson, Kraft Foods and US Bancorp. Fairfax benefited from declines in U.S. banks during the financial crisis, purchasing credit-default swaps on lenders. The swaps, instruments based on bonds and loans that are used to speculate on a company's ability to repay debt, led to investment gains of $2.72 billion in 2008. Watsa has shifted in recent years to investing in U.S. municipal bonds backed by Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway.