The once-dominant maker of smartphones has been facing hard times in recent years, but now it seems to have found a suitor willing to pay $4.7 billion for the troubled company. Fairfax Financial, a Canadian company already having 10% of BlackBerry, is going to acquire it for $9 a share.

Fairfax Financial is a life insurance and investment management company based in Toronto. The deal will make BlackBerry private and remove the company from a public listing on Nasdaq, where its stocks have fallen from $148 five years ago to $8 today. The current market value of the company is $4.65 billion, and BlackBerry said it is ready to take a better offer if another buyer appears.

So, the agreement in question, which halted the company’s stock on the Nasdaq at $8.23 per share, is just a letter of intent, one step below a full merger agreement. Fairfax Financial Group is still seeking financing, so any deal is in its very early stages.

BlackBerry announced a few days ago that it would miss revenue estimates by a large amount, warning financial analysts that it would only record revenues of $1.6 billion, twice less than analysts expected. In addition, the company is going to write off $1 billion due to excess inventory of the BlackBerry 10, which suffered disappointing sales.

In an effort to cut costs, the company was going to lay off 4,500 employees. The industry experts agreed that BlackBerry may run out of cash in a year if it didn’t go through another round of layoffs. It is believed that BlackBerry burned cash fast, while its patents are declining in value.

Some of the financial analysts estimate BlackBerry’s real value at only $7 per share. Of those $7, the company’s services division are estimated to be worth $5 per share, the OS $1 and the intellectual property another $1. The observers expect the company will soon go away as a handset brand and likely as a smartphone operating system as well. The brand may only remain as part of the standalone BlackBerry Messenger app.

It is difficult to say whether the Fairfax agreement is enough to answer smartphone makers’ critics about the future of BlackBerry. Although it indicates that BlackBerry has done its best to attract a buyer, the agreement itself is so soft that it may fail to provide the certainty the market needs. However, it may still act as a lure to other buyers.