Blackberry maker Research In Motion still hasn’t mentioned its acquisition of Dash Navigation publicly despite the story milling around on the web for almost a of month now. Why is this? According to some number crunching by Davis Freeberg, the secrecy may lay with RIM’s intentions for the navigation company. While it’s assumed that Dash’s software will be integrated into the navigational component of Blackberry smartphones, Freeberg reveals that the real intention for the purpose could be nothing more than a tax cut for RIM.
By digging through RIM’s recent 6K filing (which doesn’t mention Dash by name), Freeberg was able to derive a final $8.3 million purchase price for Dash. Peanuts when you consider the company raised 3 rounds of financing worth $71 million. But while that amounts to an 88 percent loss for investors, RIM grabbed a $26 million tax credit for the purchase giving the company a return of over 300 percent. And that’s without doing anything. As Freeberg points out, hopefully this isn’t the only reason RIM went for the hot deal because it would be a shame to see Dash’s technology go to waste.
