Major telco moves

Sony's $3.6 billion stock offer, and several mid-sized acquisitions, including ones by Amadeus and Cisco, were the main stories of the international ICT market last week.

At home, government's sell-off of its Vodacom stake, and the Competition Commission's approval of the Vodacom/Neotel deal stole much of the local ICT media space.

* Mediocre nine-month numbers from Telemasters, with revenue down 7.9% and profit down 15.4%.
* Good year-end figures from Naspers, with revenue up 16.5% and profit up 114.8%.
* A full-year loss from Amecor, although revenue up 28.1%.
* The $9 million acquisition by Alaris Holdings of US-based Antenna Research Associates.
* iSolve Business Solutions acquired Foster Melliar, which will be merged with iSolve's Learning Solutions division to create a new company, Foster Melliar Learning Solutions. Both companies are subsidiaries of the Morvest Business Group.
* The Public Investment Corporation's R24.9 billion purchase of government's 13.91% stake in Vodacom.
* The merger of Kolok with Paper Plot, a provider of large-format digital media and printers. Both companies are part of the Bidvest Group
* Adapt IT announced its subsidiaries ApplyIT Proprietary Limited, Swicon360 Proprietary Limited, Swicon360 HCM Spectrum Proprietary Limited, ITS eVula Proprietary Limited, Aquilon Proprietary Limited, Aquilon Evolution Holdings Proprietary Limited, Aquilon Evolution Consulting Proprietary Limited, AspiviaUnison Proprietary Limited, Unison Communications Holdings Proprietary Limited, Unison Communications Proprietary Limited and Aspivia Proprietary Limited will be amalgamated as Adapt IT Proprietary Limited.
* Facebook has opened an office in Johannesburg, its first in Africa.
* The Competition Commission has approved the Neotel/Vodacom merger subject to certain conditions.
* A new JSE cautionary by Jasco.
* A renewed JSE cautionary by TCS.
* The appointment of Frans Matlala as CEO of the SABC.
* The departures of Stephen Mncube, chairman of ICASA, and Department of Telecommunications and Postal Services deputy director-general Themba Phiri.

* Orange and other members of the ACE consortium announced the connection of Benin and the Canary Islands to the ACE submarine cable.
* Orange created a new legal entity that will house its operations in the Middle East and Africa. It also indicated it could look to welcome strategic or financial investors in the unit and did not rule out the possibility of a flotation.
* The appointment of Paul Collins as Acer Africa country manager.

Orange created a new legal entity that will house its operations in the Middle East and Africa.

* The $830 million acquisition by Amadeus of Navitaire, a subsidiary of Accenture.
* Cisco's $635 million purchase of OpenDNS, a network security company.
* Electronics for Imaging bought privately-held Matan Digital Printers, a provider of technologies for super-wide-format display graphics and other industrial printing applications.
* EY purchased the systems consulting arm of manufacturing intelligence firm Entegreat, in a deal intended to enhance EY's smart manufacturing services.
* Gartner bought Nubera, a privately held company based in Barcelona, whose flagship Web property is GetApp, which helps organisations discover, compare and choose the right business software and applications for their needs.
* The acquisition by Level 3 Communications of Black Lotus, a provider of distributed denial of service mitigation services.
* PayPal's $890 million acquisition of online money-transfer company Xoom.
* The $105 million acquisition by Playtech of currency trading platform Ava Trade in a deal intended to expand its online trading platform.
* The acquisition by Telstra's video platform unit, Ooyala, of UK-based Nativ, a media software provider.
* The $100 million acquisition by Turkcell of the 44.96% stake in Astelit, its Ukrainian subsidiary, that it does not already own.
* The $720 million acquisition by Vista Equity Partners of a majority stake in Mediaocean, a software supplier to advertising agencies.
* Baidu's $3.2 billion investment in online-to-offline services, including its group-buying service Nuomi.
* The US Supreme Court denied a Google appeal that sought to stop a billion-dollar Oracle lawsuit re some Android Java code.
* Apple lost its anti-trust appeal re its e-book pricing conspiracy.
* A German regional court ruled Google's video-sharing Web site YouTube must prevent users from posting material that infringes copyright law once such a video has been brought to its attention.
* A US judge signed off a $50 million settlement between the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Sprint over claims the mobile carrier added unauthorised charges to customer phone bills.
* Colt will exit from IT services.
* HP has formerly filed the paperwork for the set-up of the newly created HP Enterprise Company and other documents associated with its planned split later this year.
* NII Holdings has emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and plans to focus on Brazil.
* Sony announced a $3.6 billion stock offering.
* Mixed quarterly figures from Progress Software, with revenue up but profit down.
* A full-year loss from Imagination Technologies.
* The appointments of J Mark Howell as interim chief executive of Angie's List; Peter Kaliaropoulos as CEO of Touch Lebanon; Tetsuya Shoji as CEO of NTT Communications; and Hilda Tonne as CEO of the merged Danish operations of TeliaSonera and Telenor.
* The resignations of Akira Arima, CEO of NTT Communications; Ren'ee James, president of Intel; and Bill Veghte, head of HP's Enterprise Group.
* The departure of Wassim Mansour, CEO of Touch Lebanon.
* The death of Matti Makkonen, known as the 'father of SMS'.
* A planned IPO on Nasdaq from NII Holdings (for its new shares).
* An IPO filings for the NYSE from Caribbean telco group.
* An excellent IPO on the NYSE by Teladoc, a digital health platform.
* A satisfactory IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange by Legend Holdings, the parent of Lenovo.
* A good IPO in Spain by Euskaltel, a Spanish fibre broadband telecoms group.

South Africa:
* According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index 2015, there will be 27 million Internet users in SA by 2019, up from 15 million in 2014. IP traffic is also forecast to grow six-fold, representing an annual growth rate of 44%. Cisco said a significant percentage of that growth will centre on Internet video consumption, with South Africans expected to download 43 billion minutes of video content by 2019.

EMEA/Africa:
* According to IDC, the external disk storage systems market in EMEA in Q115 registered one of its heftiest declines in recent years, dropping 6% year over year to $1.7 billion in user value. Total capacity grew 16% year on year to 2.9 exabytes, with a slowdown in $/GB due to the increasing adoption of flash-powered systems.

Worldwide:
* According to Bharti Airtel, it has become the world's third largest mobile operator behind China Mobile and Vodafone, with over 303 million connections.
* According to Gartner, worldwide IT spending is on pace to total $3.5 trillion in 2015, a 5.5% decline from 2014 that analysts attribute to the rising US dollar. In Gartner's previous forecast in April, it had forecast IT spending to decline 1.3% in US dollars.
* According to IC Insights, smartphones accounted for more than 50% of total quarterly cellphone shipments in Q12013. In Q415, smartphones are forecast to reach 435 million units or 80% of total cellphones shipped.
* According to IDC, vendor revenue from sales of infrastructure products (server, storage, and Ethernet switch) for cloud IT, including public and private cloud, grew by 25.1% year over year to nearly $6.3 billion in 1Q15.

* JSE All share index: Down 1.3%
* Nasdaq: Down 1.4%
* NYSE (Dow): Down 1.2%
* S&P 500: Down 1.2%
* FTSE100: Down 2.5%
* Nikkei225: Down 0.8%
* Hang Seng: Down 2.2%
* Shanghai: Down 12.1%
* Top SA share movements: AEEI (-25.1%), Altron (+13.5%), Amecor (+15%), Cognition (-6.7%), Datacentrix (+7.7%), Labat Africa (-6.3%) and Silverbridge Holdings (+6.3%)

International:
* An interest by Altice in a KPN takeover.
* The sale or IPO of Interactive Data Corporation, one of the world's largest financial data providers.
* The investment by Alibaba in Paytm, an Indian online payment platform and e-commerce firm.

South Africa:
* More information on the Telkom/BCX and Vodacom/Neotel deals.

Fortune magazine has published its Top 500 US-based companies list for 2015. From a technology perspective, the following are included in the top 100:

* 5 Apple (same as last year)
* 12 AT&T (was 11)
* 15 Verizon Communications (was 16)
* 18 HP (was 17)
* 24 IBM (was 23)
* 29 Amazon (was 34)
* 31 Microsoft
* 40 Google (was 46)
* 43 Comcast (was 44)
* 52 Intel (was 53)
* 60 Cisco (was 55)
* 62 Ingram Micro (was 69)
* 81 Oracle (was 82)
* 95 DirecTV (was 98)

Other major movements in the list include:

* 190 Micron Technology (up from 302)
* 191 Jabil Circuit (down from 155)
* 220 Synnex (up from 260)
* 229 CSC (down from 185)
* 242 Facebook (up from 341)
* 297 Corning (up from 343)
* 363 Motorola Solutions (was 312)
* 474 Netflix (new entrant)
* 483 Salesforce.com (new entrant)
* 487 Amphenol (new entrant)
* 492 Arris Group (new entrant)
* 494 Alliance Data Systems (new entrant)

Harris and NII Holdings have disappeared from the latest 500 list.

Further analysis will follow next week.