Cramer: BlackBerry May Be Ripe for a Takeover

BlackBerry's better-than-expected earnings report boosts its value as a possible takeover target for a larger tech company, CNBC's Jim Cramer says.

Thursday's earnings report "makes it more likely that they will be in business for a long time," Cramer said on "Squawk on the Street." "It makes it more likely that a Nokia or a Microsoft will take a run at them."

"I think the shorts are trying to color the darned thing. I don't buy the bear case, there are a lot of people who want to own this company," he said.

Another good indication in the earnings, he said, is that the company's new products, like the Z10 smartphone, haven't been fully realized. "Maybe you don't even have to think about the device. The subscription model may still be good even if you lose some subscribers," he said.

(Read More: Investors Abandon Blackberry After 'Disappointing' Launch)

Excluding items, BlackBerry made a profit of 22 cents per share, down sharply from 80 cents a share in the year-earlier period. Those figures, however, were far ahead of what Wall Street was expecting. Analysts had expected BlackBerry to report a quarterly loss of 29 cents a share on $2.85 billion in revenue, according to a consensus estimate from Thomson Reuters.

"I think that there are people that want this stock down. This company was supposed to have a terrible quarter. This was not a terrible quarter," he said. "This company was on the ropes. It's not anymore."

Cramer added that BlackBerry CEO, Thorsten Heins, "has managed to fix the balance sheet, much like what Meg (Whitman) has done at Hewlett Packard. Balance sheet fixing is stage one in a turnaround."

He also reminded investors that the company has strong support in overseas markets, like Indonesia and Europe. "One of the things we forget, this is an entrenched product," he said.

"There are a lot of things that can go right with BlackBerry if the balance sheet improves, which it has. Things can change quickly," he said.

Disclosures: At the time of this writing, Cramer's charitable trust had no positions in the companies in this article.

—By CNBC's Paul Toscano. Follow him on Twitter and get the latest stories from "Squawk on the Street" @ToscanoPaul

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