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Altice splashes out in France

The company acquired SFR, France's second-largest telecommunications operator, for EUR17 billion.

Paul Booth
By Paul Booth
Johannesburg, 14 Apr 2014

Altice's EUR17 billion acquisition of Vivendi's SFR business, and the latest investment from Alibaba were the main international ICT stories last week.

At home it was very quiet, with the announcements by Orange being the most visible ICT news.

Key local news

* A positive trading update from Datacentrix.
* A negative trading update from Business Connexion.
* Orange is setting up shop in Johannesburg, ie, moving its online distribution facilities from London to SA; and will set up an ISP.
* A renewed JSE cautionary by Morvest Business Group.
* The appointment of Gerrit Pretorius as non-executive chairman of Digicore.

Key African news

* Dimension Data is opening an office in Ghana.
* Seacom has entered a deal with Akamai Technologies to deploy the latter's content clusters and caching nodes on its network.
* Seven Seas Technology (Kenya) has pushed back its IPO until 2017 in order to reduce its dependence on its home market.
* Nokia is setting up a base in Nairobi for growth into the CEWA region. It will be headed by Salvatore Maisano.
* The launch by YooMee Africa Group of its LTE operations in C^ote d'Ivoire.

Key international news

Orange is setting up shop in Johannesburg.

* Altice acquired SFR, France's second-largest telecommunications operator, in a move that will see it merge with Numericable, the former's French subsidiary. The deal was worth EUR17 billion.
* Amazon bought comiXology, a digital comic book publisher.
* GTCR Valor Merger Sub, a private equity firm, purchased Vocus, a provider of cloud-based marketing and PR software, for $446.5 million.
* IBM acquired Silverpop, a provider of personalised customer engagements.
* Lenovo bought a portfolio (>3 800) of patents from NEC.
* Symphony Teleca, a technology services firm, purchased Aditi Technologies (India), a company strong in cloud, design and engineering.
* Twitter acquired Cover, an Android lock-screen app that lets you customise what apps you see and when.
* Verizon bought Cincinnati Bell's mobile business for $210 million
* Xerox purchased Smart Data Consulting, in a move designed to expand its e-discovery services and technology consulting capabilities designed for law firms and corporations.
* Qualcomm and Samsung invested in Ineda, a wearable chip start-up.
* Alibaba made a $1 billion+ (20%) investment in Wasu Media Holding, a Chinese Internet TV company.
* Vodafone made an additional $1.5 billion (11%) investment in Vodafone India, with the stake that was held by Piramal Enterprises.
* BlackBerry has won a patent trial involving NXP, the Dutch semiconductor company.
* Rovi has lost its patent fight with Amazon.
* The banks have joined forces and are suing Olympus for $273 million over an accounting fraud that lasted two decades.
* HP is paying $108 million to settle foreign bribery probes.
* Kudelski, a technology group, has filed a lawsuit against Apple for patent infringements.
* Microsoft is being sued over a browser error that led to an EU fine.
* Gartner announced the best 10 practices to follow in order to reduce the risk of using Windows XP systems now that support for it has ended.
* On 8 April it was the 50th anniversary of IBM's original mainframe, the System/360.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from Shaw Communications and Tech Data.
* Mixed quarterly figures from iGate, with revenue up but profit down.
* The appointment of Alan Whelan as group CEO of Batelco.
* The retirements of David Lee, CTO of Acer; and Marc Lefar, CEO of Vonage.
* An IPO filing on NYSE from Zendesk, a company that provides online helpdesk software.

Research results and predictions

South Africa:
* The South African security appliances market declined 10.3% in Q4 2013 to total $12.25 million, according to IDC.

EMEA/Africa:
* Kenyan enterprises are increasingly prioritising cloud and hosting solutions in a quest to drive down the costs of data centres, according to IDC.
* The MEA enterprise hardware market, comprising servers and external storage, remains in a passive state, according to IDC.

Worldwide:
* Worldwide traditional PC, tablet, ultra-mobile and mobile phone shipments are on track to grow 6.9% this year to reach 2.5 billion units, according to Gartner.
* Worldwide PC shipments in Q1 declined 1.7% with Lenovo increasing its market share by more than any of the other top five players, according to Gartner.
* The business technology spending market will grow at a CAGR of 6.9% over the period 2012 to 2017 to reach $330.7 billion; while enterprise IT grows slowly at 1.9% over the same period, according to IDC.
* The worldwide wearables computing market will exceed 19 million shipments in 2014, and is expected to grow to over 110 million shipments in 2018, according to IDC.

Stock market changes

* JSE All share index: Down 0.7%
* Nasdaq: Down 3.1%
* NYSE (Dow): Down 2.4%
* S&P 500: Down 3.7%
* FTSE100: Down 2%
* Top SA share movements: Amecor (-7.8%), Business Connexion (-6.7%), Huge Group (+10.4%), MiX Telematics (-12.9%) and Poynting Holdings (+34.4%)

Look out for

International:
* A possible bid for Vodafone from Softbank.

South Africa:
* Further South African-oriented initiatives from Orange.

Final word

Fortune magazine recently published its 'World's 50 Greatest Leaders' list. From a technology perspective, the following were named:
* 10: Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com;
* 16: Jack Ma, founder and chairman of the Alibaba Group;
* 33: Tim Cook, CEO of Apple;
* 35: Strive Masiyiwa, founder and chairman of Econet Wireless;
* 40: Anand Mahindra, chairman of Mahindra Mahindra;
* 42: Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube; and
* 47: Juliana Rotich, co-founder and executive director of Ushahidi.

As next weekend is Easter, my next column will appear on 28 April and will cover the intervening two weeks.

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