Windows 10 takes the stage

The release of Windows 10 and a flood of quarterly results dominated the international ICT market last week.

At home, the suspension of Neotel's CEO and CFO, and the negative trading update from MTN, were the main local ICT stories.

* A half-year loss from Stella Capital Partners.
* A full-year loss from Ellies, with revenue down 40.5%.
* Positive trading updates from Datatec and Stella Capital Partners.
* A negative trading update from MTN.
* A mixed trading update from Telkom SA.
* The suspension of Morvest Business Group's shares on the JSE.
* Datatec (Logicalis) acquired Advanced Technology Integration Group, a solution provider offering system integration and professional services to enterprise and commercial customers across the Midwest region of the United States. The deal was worth $42 million.
* Sunil Joshi, CEO of Neotel, and the company's CFO, Steven Whiley, have been placed on "special leave".
* A renewed JSE cautionary by Huge Group.
* The resignation of telecoms and postal services DDG Sam Vilakazi.

* Excellent half-year numbers from StarLink, with revenue up over 100%.
* Orange made an additional investment in Morocco's M'editel, a move that brings its stake up to 49%.
* The Libyan Investment Authority has launched legal action against Zambia over the alleged nationalisation of the Zambia Telecommunications Company (Zamtel). In addition, the authority will reportedly pursue similar action against Chad, Rwanda and Niger.

Sunil Joshi, CEO of Neotel, and the company's CFO, Steven Whiley, have been placed on "special leave".

* HP acquired ActiveState Software's Stackato business, an enterprise-ready platform as a service solution, with Cloud Foundry at its core.
* NTT Communications bought Cyber CSF, a data centre service provider headquartered in Jakarta, Indonesia.
* Telefonica purchased Vivendi's 7.5% stake in Telefonica Brasil.
* Telekom Austria's Bulgarian subsidiary, Mobiltel, acquired Blizoo Bulgaria.
* Yahoo bought social shopping site Polyvore.
* Alibaba will invest $1 billion in cloud computing over the next three years.
* Dixons Carphone is selling The Phone House Portugal to Digital Place, a company owned by the shareholders of the TLCI group of companies, a telecoms retailer and wholesaler in that region.
* Microsoft released Windows 10.
* Skyworks Solutions has become a component of the Nasdaq-100 index.
* Excellent quarterly results from Cray (back in the black) and Orbotech.
* Very good quarterly figures from Synchronoss Technologies Vasco Data Security International.
* Good quarterly numbers from Anixter International, ASM International, Cadence Design Systems, Equinix, IPG Photonics, Monolithic Power Systems, Nintendo (back in the black), Silicon Motion and Verisk Analytics.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from ADP, Baidu, Broadcom (back in the black), Citrix Systems, Corning, FormFactor (back in the black), KLA-Tencor, Kyocera, Nice Systems, Nokia, PayPal, SBA Communications (back in the black), Shenandoah Telecommunications, Sony, Telefonica, United Microelectronics and Vonage.
* Mediocre quarterly results from Amkor Technology, Arris Group, Atmel, AU Optronics, AVX, Canon, CDK Global, Diebold, EE, Garmin, InterDigital, Iron Mountain, Ixys, L-3 Communications, LG Electronics, MediaTek, OpenText, Orange, Plantronics, Qlogic, Samsung Electronics, Seagate Technology, TPK and Western Digital.
* Mediocre half-year figures from Zain Group.
* Mixed quarterly figures from Akamai Technologies, with revenue up but profit down; Amdocs, with revenue up but profit down; American Tower, with revenue up but profit down; Arrow Electronics, with revenue up but profit down; Belden, with revenue down but profit up; CGI, with revenue down but profit up; Ciber, with revenue down but back in the black; Electronic Arts, with revenue down but profit up; Etisalat, with revenue up but profit down; Facebook, with revenue up but profit down; Fair Isaac, with revenue up but profit down; FEI, with revenue down but profit up; Fiserv, with revenue up but profit down; Forrester Research, with revenue down but profit up; Gartner, with revenue up but profit down; Innolux, with revenue down but profit up; Insight Enterprises, with revenue up but profit down; Informatica, with revenue up but profit down; Intelsat, with revenue up but profit down; Intersil, with revenue down but profit up; Lam Research, with revenue up but profit down; MicroStrategy, with revenue down but back in the black; Ntelos Holdings, with revenue down but profit up; Numericable-SFR, with revenue down but back in the black; Panasonic, with revenue up but profit down; PC Connection, with revenue down but profit up; Pitney Bowes, with revenue down but profit up; Rovi, with revenue down but back in the black; Ruckus Wireless, with revenue up but profit down; Saudi Telecom, with revenue up but profit down; Synaptics, with revenue up but profit down; T-Mobile, with revenue up but profit down; Telesat, with revenue up but profit down; Teradyne, with revenue down but profit up; Time Warner Cable, with revenue up but profit down; Ultimate Software, with revenue up but profit down; web.com, with revenue down but back in the black; and Yandex, with revenue up but profit down.
* Very poor quarterly figures from Black Box and Datalink.
* Quarterly losses from Alcatel-Lucent, Applied Micro Circuits, Cavium, Cincinnati Bell, Colt Telecoms, CommVault Systems, FireEye, Guidance Software, Harte-Hanks, Ingram Micro, Lattice Semiconductor, Level 3 Communications, LinkedIn, NCR, Quantum, RadiSys, ServiceNow, Stratasys, Tableau Software, Twitter and Yelp.
* The retirement of Mark Templeton, CEO of Citrix Systems.

EMEA/Africa:
* Workstation shipments in the EMEA region contracted by 3.4% year on year in Q115, according to IDC.

Worldwide:
* Global tablet shipments declined 10% sequentially and over 15% year on year to reach only 45.76 million units in Q215, according to Digitimes Research.
* The worldwide tablet market declined 7% year over year in 2Q15, with shipments totalling 44.7 million units, according to IDC.

* JSE All share index: Up 1.4%
* Nasdaq: Up 0.8%
* NYSE (Dow): Up 0.9%
* S&P 500: Up 1.2%
* FTSE100: Up 1.8%
* Nikkei225: Up 0.2%
* Hang Seng: Down 2%
* Shanghai: Down 10%
* Top SA share movements: Alaris (+10.6%), Altron (-16.6%), Ansys (+9.4%), Huge Group (+8.6%), Net 1 UEPS Technologies (+7.6%) and Telkom SA (+11.2%)

International:
* Altice taking a stake in France's NextRadioTV.

South Africa:
* Details of the planned R1 billion acquisition by the Huge Group.

Fortune magazine has published its Global 500 list, which shows the top 500 global companies generated $31.2 trillion in revenue and $1.4 trillion in profit in 2014. From a technology perspective, the following managed to be in the top 100:

* 13: Samsung, same as 2014
* 15: Apple, same as 2014
* 31: Hon Hai Precision Industry Hai Precision (Foxconn), up from 32
* 33: AT&T, up from 34
* 41: Verizon Communications, up from 42
* 53: HP, down from 50
* 55: China Mobile, same as 2014
* 65: NTT, down from 53
* 82: IBM, down from 51
* 88: Amazon, up from 112
* 89: Hitachi, down from 78
* 95: Microsoft, up from 104

Further analysis will follow next week.