Mitel swallows Polycom

China's continued investment in technology companies, and Mitel's acquisition of Polycom were the main stories in the international ICT market last week.

At home, the disposal of the majority of Altron's Aberdare Group and the investment in Net 1 were the main local happenings.

* Mixed interim numbers from Telemasters, with revenue up 5.2% but profit down 64.3%.
* Convergence Partners and Stockdale Street acquired e4, a South African company with an international footprint in Africa, Europe, the US and Australia, which operates software as a service platforms to provide solutions and services to clients operating in the financial services, retail and legal sectors.
* EOH bought Aptronics for R124 million. Aptronics' core business is in the high-end data centre and end-user computing space and provides services that include networking, virtualisation, servers, storage and infrastructure solutions.
* Hengtong Optic, fourth largest cable manufacturer in China, purchased Altron's subsidiary Aberdare Group for R1.2 billion. The transaction excludes the CBI Electric Aberdare ATC Telecom Cables joint venture in which Aberdare Cables holds a 50% equity stake, as well as the 49% equity stake in Alcon Marepha, which has been sold separately for R19 million.
* Tritech Media, the media technology innovator controlled by the Kirsh family, has announced the acquisition of an effective 51% interest in Ionizr, the pioneer in real-time proximity advertising technology in SA. Wayne Venter, CEO and founder of Ionizr, retains a 49% interest.
* International Finance Corporation and IFC Asset Management Company Funds made a $107 million equity investment in Net 1 UEPS Technologies.
* Open-access fibre telecommunications infrastructure provider Dark Fibre Africa invested in fibre-to-the-home specialist SA Digital Villages.
* Datacentrix, together with the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development and 12 other ICT service providers, have been cited in an application brought in the High Court of SA by Dimension Data regarding the bid award involving the provision, implementation, maintenance and support of a court recording technology solution in January 2015.
* The appointments of Guy Clarke as MD of Vodacom Business Africa; and Mike Rogers, an ex-Accenture director, as CEO of Tarsus SecureData.
* The departure of Carlo Venter, CEO of Tarsus SecureData.

* Botswana Telecommunications, the country's established public telecommunications operator, has listed on the Botswana bourse.
* The IDC has opened a dedicated office in Cairo's Smart Village.
* The appointment of Lanre Kolade as MD of Vodacom Business Nigeria.

The IDC has opened a dedicated office in Cairo's Smart Village.

* Bharti Airtel acquired Aircel's 4G spectrum in eight circles for $525.9 million.
* Black Box bought technology and intellectual property from Cloudium Systems, a privately held Irish company. The Cloudium development team will join Black Box.
* Cadence Design Systems purchased Rocketick Technologies, an Israeli-based provider of multicore parallel simulation.
* Logitech International acquired Jaybird, a provider of wireless audio wearables for sports and active lifestyles, a category the company created in 2006. The deal was worth $95 million.
* Mitel Networks bought Polycom, a fellow voice and telephony gear maker, for $1.96 billion.
* Oracle purchased Crosswire, an Israeli company that tries to figure out the devices people use and match them to the user as s/he surfs the Web with his/her smartphone, tablet and PC. The deal was worth $50 million.
* Teledyne Technologies acquired Quantum Data, a provider of electronic test and measurement instrumentation and video protocol analysis test tools.
* Telit Communications bought several cellular module product lines, related IP and assets of Novatel Wireless.
* Vivendi purchased the pay TV unit (Mediaset Premium) of Italy's Mediaset in a bid to expand its video-on-demand offerings.
* Alibaba Group made a $1 billion investment in Singapore e-commerce start-up Lazada Group, as well as a $1.25 billion investment - with its Internet finance arm Ant Financial - in the Chinese online food-delivery service company Ele.me.
* China's Tsinghua Unigroup made a 6% investment in Lattice Semiconductor.
* Vivendi made a 15% investment in Groupe Fnac SA, the French electronics retailer.
* Microsoft is suing the US government for the right to tell its customers when a federal agency is looking at their e-mails.
* China's IRICO Display Devices plans to invest $3.56 billion in glass substrate and TFT-LCD projects funded through a private placement of shares.
* Chinese online direct sales company JD.com and its online-to-offline unit, JD Daojia, will merge with Dada Nexus, a crowdsourcing platform, to form a new company.
* Overstock.com's founder and CEO Patrick Byrne will take an indefinite personal leave of absence for medical reasons.
* Good quarterly numbers from Infosys.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from Software AG.
* Mediocre quarterly results from TSMC.
* Mixed quarterly figures from ADTRAN, with revenue down but profit up; and Shaw Communications, with revenue up but profit down.
* A full-year loss from Rocket Internet.

EMEA/Africa:
* The MEA enterprise hardware market (comprising servers and external storage) remained flat at $2.31 billion in 2015 when compared to the annual revenue seen in the previous year, according to IDC.
* EMEA purpose-built backup appliance vendor revenue decreased 13% year over year to reach $277 million in Q415, according to IDC. For the full year 2015, the EMEA market fell 5% to just over $935 million from $985 million in 2014.

Worldwide:
* Mobile broadband operators will reap 5G revenue of US$247 billion in 2025, with North America Asia-Pacific, and Western Europe being the top markets, according to ABI Research.
* An estimated 371 360 million handset-use touch panels and 48.849 million touch panels used in smaller than 11-inch tablets were shipped globally during the first quarter of 2016, according to Digitimes Research. This is a decrease of 15% and 29% respectively on the quarter, while the global shipments of 6.836 million notebook-use touch panels in the period is an increase of 0.8%.
* Worldwide PC shipments totalled 64.8 million units in Q116, a 9.6% decline from Q115, according to Gartner. This was the sixth consecutive quarter of PC shipment declines and the first time since 2007 that shipment volumes fell below 65 million units.
* Total spending on IT infrastructure products (server, storage and Ethernet switch) for deployment in cloud environments will increase by 18.9% in 2016 to reach $38.2 billion, according to IDC.

* JSE All share index: Up 3.1%
* Nasdaq: Up 1.8%
* NYSE (Dow): Up 1.8% (highest weekend close in 2016)
* S&P 500: Up 1.6% (highest weekend close in 2016)
* FTSE100: Up 2.2% (highest weekend close in 2016)
* DAX: Up 4.5%
* Nikkei225: Up 6.5%
* Hang Seng: Up 4.6%
* Shanghai: Up 3.1%

International:
* Further developments regarding the Dell/EMC acquisition.

South Africa:
* Developments regarding the DOJ tender award involving Dimension Data and Datacentrix.
* The possible sell-off by Altron of its UEC operation.

Inc. magazine recently published its 2016 'Founders 40' list of newly public companies driving innovation. Included in the list are: Aerohive, Box, FireEye, Fitbit, GoDaddy, GoPro, Imprivata, Inovalon Holdings, Marketo, MobileIron, Pure Storage, Rapid 7, Shopify, Square, Tableau Software, TubeMogul and Zendesk.