Applied Materials forks out $4.9bn

The multibillion-dollar deal between Applied Materials and Varian Semiconductor, and some successful IPOs, dominated the international ICT market last week. At home the market was very quiet.

* Mixed interim numbers from ConvergeNet Holdings, with revenue up 20% but profit down 9%.
* Mixed year-end figures from Altron, with revenue up 2% but profit down 17%.
* A quarterly loss from Net 1 UEPS, although revenue up 19%.
* The appointments of Gois Fouche as HP's enterprise business strategy and transformation manager in SA; and Stefano Mattiello (ex-Neotel) as Cisco's channel director in SA.

* Good year-end figures from Econet Wireless Zimbabwe, with revenue up 36% and profit up 25%. Its subscriber base jumped 55% to 5.5 million.
* Satisfactory year-end numbers from Telecom Namibia, with revenue up 3% and profit up 173%.
* Web4Africa, a West African Web hosting company, bought the Web hosting and domain names services of Alireta Nigeria.
* Sea cable operators Main One and Seacom have interconnected their West African and East African cable systems, and now offer connection between any point of presence between South Africa and Nigeria.
* 4most, a SAP partner, has opened an office in Botswana.
* Malawi-owned Celcom has been granted a mobile licence by the local telecommunications authority, MACRA.
* Yves de Talhou?t was appointed HP's MD for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

LinkedIn intends to list its shares on the NYSE through an IPO later this year.

Paul Booth, MD, Global Research Partners

* Alvarion acquired Clarion Networks, an Israeli company that develops products enabling the delivery of cellular voice and data traffic to homes. The deal was worth $4 million.
* Applied Materials purchased Varian Semiconductor for $4.9 billion, in a deal that brings together the largest producer of chip-making equipment and a company that designs, manufactures, markets, and services semiconductor processing equipment. This equipment is used in the fabrication of integrated circuits, which is very pertinent for the smartphone and solar equipment markets. This is the largest transaction in the last five years within the semiconductor industry, and in the last 12 months, the two companies had combined revenue in excess of $11 billion.
* Arrow Electronics bought Cross Telecom, a provider of converged and Internet Protocol technologies and unified communications products.
* DST Systems acquired Newkirk Products, a leader in the development and deployment of communications, education and investment information for clients in the retirement planning, managed care and wealth management industries. This is the second acquisition by DST Systems in the last month.
* Kaseya purchased Intellipool AB, a provider of automated IT systems management software.
* Sophos bought Astaro, a network security solutions company.
* VimpelCom acquired the Russian mobile network, New Telephone Company, from South Korea's KT Corporation and Summit Global management, a subsidiary of Sumitomo Corporation. The deal was worth $420 million. Recently, VimpelCom also bought into Orascom Egypt.
* Xerox (APAC Customer Services) acquired SEI's telecom-sales services business.
* LinkedIn intends to list its shares on the NYSE through an IPO later this year.
* Excellent quarterly results from HTC.
* Very good quarterly figures from Cognizant Technology Solutions and Infineon Technologies AG.
* Very good year-end numbers from Huawei Technologies.
* Good quarterly numbers from CACI, Garmin, Gartner and Sykes Enterprises (back in the black).
* Satisfactory quarterly results from ADP, BMC Software, Logica, Plantronics, Telenor and Zain.
* Mediocre quarterly results from Asustek, Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom.
* Mixed quarterly figures from American Tower, with revenue up but profit down; Bharti Airtel, with revenue up but profit down; Harris, with revenue up but profit down; Hon Hai Precision Industries, with revenue up but profit down; MicroStrategy, with revenue up but profit well down; Quanta (Taiwan), with revenue down but profit up; and Teradata, with revenue up but profit down.
* Very poor quarterly figures from AOL.
* Quarterly losses from Alcatel-Lucent, Alvarion, Level 3 Communications, Real Networks and SGI.
* A very good IPO on the NYSE by Rengen, one of the largest Chinese social networking sites. This deal is the largest Chinese technology IPO on the NYSE so far, and the first social media listing ahead of expected offerings by LinkedIn and Facebook.
* RPX had a good IPO on Nasdaq. The patent-protection service provider is heavily utilised by technology-orientated companies.
* A satisfactory IPO on Nasdaq by Boingo, a WiFi network company.

* International:
* The possible $50 million purchase by Twitter of TweetDeck, a software application for using Internet social networking services.
* The fate of the heir apparent to Sony's CEO Howard Stringer, Kazuo Hirai, the head of the company's videogames unit, following the online security breaches that have occurred.
* Africa:
* Bharti Airtel spinning off its African tower business.
* South Africa:
* The publication of the ICT Charter for final comments.

* Worldwide IT services revenue grew 3.1% in 2010 to reach $792.955 billion, according to Gartner. The top five players all kept the positions they held in 2009.
* The worldwide enterprise software market grew 8.5% in 2010 to reach $245 billion, according to Gartner.
* PC microprocessor unit shipments grew 7.4% in Q1, according to IDC.

* JSE All share index: Down 2.9%
* Nasdaq: Down 1.6%
* Top SA share movements: ConvergeNet Holdings (+9.5%), Dialogue Group (+37.5%), FoneWorx (-9.5%), Ideco (+25%), Ifca Technologies (+12.5%) and Net 1 UEPS Technologies (-8.9%)

Capgemini recently published its Executive Summary Study of IT Trends 2011. In this short report, it listed the IT topics with the most increasing importance for the next two years. They were, in order:

* Social CRM (the evaluation of social networks for sales);
* Company Wikis;
* Company's internal blogs;
* Software as a service;
* Applications for mobile terminals;
* Rich Internet applications;
* Company's internal micro-blogging;
* Forums, which the company runs;
* Platforms for integration of customers in product improvement and development; and
* Business activity monitoring.