Blackberry has announced that a potential buyout by Fairfax Financial Holdings has fallen through, and that the company's CEO Thorsten Heins will be replaced.

Canadian firm Fairfax Financial Holdings had made a $4.7bn, around £3bn, bid for the smartphone company in September, which was due to be finalised at the end of trading on Monday, 4 November, but just hours before the deadline it was revealed the buyout plan had failed. BlackBerry's share price was down more than 18% in pre-market trading following the announcement.

Speculation that Fairfax would be unable to attract enough financial had circled for several weeks before the deal fell through, as rumours of alternative offers from Qualcomm, Lenovo, Facebook and BlackBerry co-founder Mike Lazaridis mounted.

The new plan to save BlackBerry will involve raising $1bn by selling convertible notes to a group of investors including Fairfax.

Heins, who has been with BlackBerry for six years, will depart the company to be replaced by John S. Chen as interim CEO. Chen has spent the last five years rebooting Sybase, an enterprise software company.

Written and presented by Alfred Joyner