A post on Weibo from Xiaomi’s president seems to be saying that his company “will acquire BlackBerry,” although it turns out that is not the case at all. G for Games points us to remarks made by Xiaomi president and cofounder Bin Lin in which he flat-out states that Xiaomi will buy BlackBerry. Skeptical of a Google translation of the Xiaomi president’s remarks, G for Games looked at the original text and broke it down word by word and, lo and behold, it seems he really did say that his company would be buying BlackBerry. However, a closer inspection reveals this is not what the Xiaomi exec actually said.
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Instead, it seems that the quote about Xiaomi buying BlackBerry was from another Weibo user who stated the BlackBerry-Xiaomi deal as fact. In response to this statement, Bin Lin said that “we do not pass rumors,” according to a Google translation. In other words, the executive was simply telling someone that he would not spread any rumors.
And frankly, we had a very, very, very hard time believing the governments of North America would ever sign off on such a sale even if it were real. After all, BlackBerry still provides critical secure mobile communications services for several western governments — U.S. president Barack Obama, U.K. prime minister David Cameron and German chancellor Angela Merkel, for instance, all still use BlackBerry devices. Rumors from last year indicated that Chinese company Huawei was interested in buying up BlackBerry but officials in both the U.S. and Canada said they would never sign off on such a deal.
Because of this, it’s virtually impossible to see North American governments giving the green light to a BlackBerry-Xiaomi merger, especially since Xiaomi’s reputation for mobile security is even dodgier than Huawei’s is.
UPDATED TO CLARIFY: This original report took G for Games’ translation of Bin Lin’s remarks at face value since the website typically offers accurate translations of news posted by Asian publications. After looking into the matter a little more deeply, we decided that G for Games was way, way off on its original interpretation and corrected the story to reflect this.
