The international ICT market was very quiet last week, with only a few small acquisitions and a handful of quarterly results.
At home, the major news stories were the proposed takeover of Vox Telecom, the imminent delisting of UCS, and the Old Mutual communications tower outsourcing deal.
Key local news
* Positive trading updates from MICROmega and Mustek.
* Datatec's Westcon acquired entrada Kommunikations, a German value-added distributor of IT security products and a provider of sales support and training services.
* A consortium, which includes Lereko Metier Capital Growth Fund and Investec, has proposed an acquisition of Vox Telecom for R499 million, in a move that will see the company delisted and Angus MacRobert appointed as joint-CEO alongside Doug Reed.
* UCS will go private and delist from the JSE.
* Old Mutual has signed a R2.49 billion deal with Telkom SA, Nashua and Dimension Data for the management of the communications tower of Old Mutual's South African IT estate.
* Deon Liebenberg has been appointed MD of Samsung Electronics SA, and Zacharias van Niekerk was named CEO of Ifca Technologies.
* Anthony Barnard resigned as CEO of Ifca Technologies, and Lars Reichelt has resigned as CEO of Cell C.
Key African news
Private affair
Paul Booth, MD, Global Research Partners
* Bharti Airtel has signed an agreement with IBM for the latter to supply comprehensive IT solutions to its employees across 16 African countries.
* Orascom Egypt has delayed its demerger into two smaller companies.
* Logan Pather was appointed acting CEO and MD of Starcomms (Nigeria).
* Maher Qubain resigned as CEO/MD of Starcomms.
Key international news
* Citrix Systems purchased Cloud.com, a cloud computing start-up.
* Electronic Art bought PopCap Games for $1.3 billion, in a move intended to ramp up the latter's social and casual games portfolio so it can better compete with Zynga.
* NCR acquired Radiant Systems, a maker of hardware and software used for the managing of hotels and restaurants. The deal was worth $1.2 billion.
* Nuance Communications purchased Webmedx, a medical transcription company.
* Open Text bought Global 360, a provider of process and case management solutions, for $260 million.
* Zynga acquired Five Mobile, a Canadian mobile applications developer.
* Dropbox, a cloud storage service provider, is looking to raise between $200 million and $300 million in a new round of fundraising. This would value the total company at about $5 billion.
* Excellent quarterly results from ASML Holding.
* Very good quarterly figures from Google and Tata Consultancy Services.
* Good quarterly numbers from Infosys.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from Fairchild Semiconductor and Novellus Systems.
* Quarterly losses from Sony Ericsson and Vodafone Qatar.
* Richard Daly was appointed CEO of Vodafone Qatar, and Zhang Wenyl was named chairman and acting CEO of SMIC.
* David Wang resigned as CEO of SMIC.
* A planned IPO from Silver Spring Networks, a 'smart grid' networking company.
* A possible IPO by Bharti Airtel of its towers business.
Look out for
International:
* The flood of quarterly results.
Africa:
* Further developments regarding Nitel.
South Africa:
* Further developments regarding the local loop unbundling, which Telkom seems to be opposing at every turn.
Research results and predictions
* The worldwide PC market grew 2.6% in Q2, according to IDC, with Lenovo grabbing third place from Acer, and Asus taking over fifth place from Toshiba. HP and Dell remain at the top of the list.
Stock market changes
* JSE All share index: Up 0.9%
* Nasdaq: Down 2.4%
* Top SA share movements: AdaptIT (-12.2%), Cape Empowerment (-16%), Ideco (+33.3%), Ifca Technologies (-25%), MiX Telematics (+10.3%), MICROmega (+19.2%), Paracon (-10.3%), Poynting Antennas (+200%), Sekunjalo (+10%) and TCS (+50%)
Final word
Linkscape has published its list of the top 500 registered Internet domains. The top 10 are:
* Google.com
* Adobe.com
* Facebook.com
* Blogspot.com
* Yahoo.com
* Wikipedia.com
* Youtube.com
* Twitter.com
* Wordpress.org
* W3.org
It's interesting to note that Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are only in the top 20, and that eBay is down at number 43.
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