Dell does the deed

Dell's acquisition of EMC dominated the international ICT market last week.

At home, Pinnacle's further investment in Datacentrix, and its offer for the remaining shares; as well as the launch of Openserve by Telkom SA, were the highlights of the local ICT market.

* Good interim numbers from Datacentrix, with revenue up 11.3% and profit up 15.5%.
* MICROmega subsidiary Turrito Networks acquired a majority stake in support specialist Dial a Nerd.
* Investec invested in fibre-to-the-home provider Vumatel.
* Pinnacle Holdings made an additional investment in Datacentrix in a move that brings the former's stake in the latter to about 45%. Offers for the remaining shares of Datacentrix have also been made.
* Mozido Africa, a subsidiary of Mozido, a digital commerce and payments solution provider, has opened its African headquarters in Johannesburg.
* Telkom SA has launched a separate wholesale broadband division, Openserve.
* A withdrawn JSE cautionary by Pinnacle Holdings.
* The resignation of Mlu Mathonsi, acting group CEO of the South African Post Office.

* Viettel, the Vietnamese operator, has launched its services in Tanzania, its 11th operating market.
* The appointments of Harish Chib as VP of Sophos MEA; and Hatem Hariri as MD of Avaya Africa.

Telkom SA has launched a separate wholesale broadband division.

* Dell has acquired EMC for $67 billion. This is the largest technology industry deal to date, and will position the merged company against organisations such as Cisco, HP and IBM. VMware, which is majority-owned by EMC, will continue as a separate listed entity.
* Ingram Micro bought DOCdata Nederland and DOCdata International, the e-commerce fulfilment business of publically traded Netherlands-based DOCdata. The deal was worth $175 million.
* Iron Mountain bought Crozier Fine Arts, a storage, logistics and transportation firm for high-value paintings, photographs and other types of art belonging to individual collectors, galleries and art museums.
* L-3 Communications purchased ForceX, which specialises in ISR mission management software and geospatial application technology programs.
* Red Hat acquired Ansible, a provider of powerful IT automation solutions.
* Vivendi invested in UbiSoft and Gameloft, two gaming companies.
* Apple has been ordered to pay $234 million in damages after a US jury found the iPhone maker used technology owned by the University of Wisconsin-Madison's licensing arm without permission, in chips found in many of its most popular devices.
* China's top three telecoms carriers - China Mobile, China Tele and China Unicom - agreed to sell their telecommunications towers to a joint venture, China Tower, the latest effort by the country to overhaul its state-controlled companies and reduce duplicate investments in the world's largest mobile market. The deal is worth almost $30 billion.
* Very good year-end pre-tax profit from Three (UK), which is in the process of being merged with UK-based O2.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from Infosys and WNS.
* Mediocre quarterly results from Adtran, ASML Holding, Intel, Linear Technology and Xilinx.
* Mixed quarterly figures from TSMC, with revenue up but profit down.
* Quarterly losses from AMD, Fairchild Semiconductor and Zhone Technologies.
* The appointments of Bob Fernander as interim CEO of Imation; Omid Kordestani as chairman of Twitter; and Sharad Mehrotra as CEO of Telenor India.
* An IPO filing for Nasdaq from Match Group, a division of IAC that owns the dating sites Tinder, OKCupid and Match.com.
* An IPO filing for Nasdaq from UK-based Mimecast, the e-mail security provider.
* An IPO filing for the NYSE from Square, a payments start-up.
* A very good IPO on the London Stock Exchange by Worldpay, the UK's largest IPO of the year.
* A disappointing IPO on the NYSE by First Data, the giant electronic payments processor. First Data was taken private by KKR in 2007.

EMEA/Africa:
* The EMEA security appliance market reached $837.65 million in 2Q15, a 0.2% year-on-year decline, according to IDC. Shipments increased 4% year on year to 183 885 units. Over the next five years, the security appliance market is expected to accelerate at a CAGR of 6.3% and reach $4.59 billion (1 018 373 units) by the end of 2019.
* PC shipments in EMEA reached 18.4 million units in Q315, a 23% decline year on year, according to IDC. The market was weakened by ongoing currency fluctuations affecting a number of countries, as well as political instability in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, while channel players across the region focused on depletion of Bing inventory in preparation for shipments of new products for the 4Q15 holiday season. Shipments of Windows 10 machines started to increase in September, but due to the free upgrade programme offered by Microsoft, demand for new devices did not pick up significantly and allowed retailers to focus on sales of Windows 8 products remaining in stock.

* JSE All share index: Down 0.7%
* Nasdaq: Up 1.2%
* NYSE (Dow): Up 0.8%
* S&P 500: Up 0.9%
* FTSE100: Down 0.6%
* Nikkei225: Down 0.8%
* Hang Seng: Up 2.7%
* Shanghai: Up 6.5%

International:
* The outcome of the Alibaba Group's offer of $3.5 billion for Youku Tudou, which is known as China's YouTube, in a move that would give the e-commerce giant access to more than half a billion online video users.
* The possible buyout of SanDisk by Micron Technology or Western Digital.
* The possible merger of Maxim Integrated Products and Analog Devices.

South Africa:
* Further news regarding the Vodacom/Neotel deal.

For Fortune's first "Change the World" list, the magazine has found 51 companies that have made a sizable impact on major global social or environmental problems as part of their competitive strategy. This list is not meant to be a ranking of the overall "goodness" of companies or of their "social responsibility". Big corporations are complex operations that affect the world in myriad ways. The goal is to shine a spotlight on instances where companies are doing well as part of their profit-making strategy, and to shed new light on the power of capitalism to improve the human condition.

From a technology perspective, the following were included:
* 1: Vodafone and Safaricom
* 2: Google (Alphabet)
* 8: Cisco
* 10: Facebook
* 13: Alibaba
* 20: IBM
* 39: Intel
* 41: Twitter
* 43: Fitbit
* 45: Opower