Big guns spend big cash

The multibillion-dollar American Tower/Global Tower, Verizon/Vodafone and Microsoft/Nokia deals were by far the major international ICT stories last week.

At home, it was a quiet week with no major stories.

* Satisfactory year-end numbers from CompuClearing, with revenue up 5.4% and profit up 5.9%.
* Good year-end figures from Metrofile, with revenue up 12.7% and profit up 18.6%; and Pinnacle Technology, with revenue up 12.9% and profit up 15.3%.
* A positive trading update from Silverbridge Holdings.
* Summit Garnishee Solutions bought BCX's Q Link business unit for R187.5 million.
* AfrAsia Special Opportunities Fund and Heritage Capital Assets made an additional investment in ConvergeNet Holdings, bringing their respective shareholdings up to 18.38% and 28.6%.
* Kolok SA has formally entered the hardware distribution market.
* The communications minister has said a more refined, succinct and meaningful broadband policy will be issued within the next three months, and that the policy on spectrum allocation will finally appear in March next year.
* Software AG's new premises were opened in Bryanston, Johannesburg, at a function that also included the presentation of Software AG's Innovation World 2013 Award to Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality.
* New JSE cautionaries by ISA Holdings and Sekunjalo Investments.
* A withdrawn JSE cautionary by Ansys.
* The appointments of Ian Cook as chairman of Logicalis, a subsidiary of Datatec; and Sandile Zungu as chairman of EOH.
* The resignations of Jens Montanana as chairman of Logicalis; and Rob Sporen as interim chairman of EOH (remains as a director).
* The retirement of Ian Cook, CEO of Logicalis.

* A company specialising in ICT products such as phones, laptops and tablets has begun operations in Ilesa, Osun state, in Western Nigeria.

* Amdocs acquired Actix, a network optimisation specialist, for $120 million.
* American Tower bought MIP Tower Holdings, the parent of Global Tower Partners, for $4.8 billion.
* ARM purchased Cadence Design Systems' PANTA display controller cores.
* Broadcom acquired LTE-related assets from Renesas Electronics for $164 million.
* eBay purchased Decide.com, a price forecasting firm.
* Ericsson acquired Airvana Network Solutions' EVDO business.
* Microsoft bought Nokia's handset unit, in a deal that also includes 10-year licences to the latter's patents, for $7.2 billion.
* Rakuten (Japan) purchased Viki, an online video-on-demand provider based in Singapore, for $200 million. In 2011, Rakuten took over Canadian e-book reading platform, Kobo, a version of which was released for the Japanese market last year.
* Trimble acquired New Zealand-based IQ Irrigation, a provider of hardware and software solutions to manage irrigation systems.
* Verizon Communications bought the 45% stake held by Vodafone in their North American joint venture for $130 billion. This deal is the third-largest ever, behind the $203 billion acquisition by Vodafone of Mannesmann in 1999 and the AOL/Time Warner $182 billion deal in 2000.
* Mail.ru disposed of its stake in Facebook for $525 million, which in turn means Naspers no longer has a stake in Facebook. Naspers has a 29% stake in Mail.ru.
* Microsoft has won its trial against Google (Motorola Mobility) regarding the latter's patent licensing tactics.
* Apple has been hit with an injunction in the e-books anti-trust case.
* Kodak has formally exited Chapter 11.
* LinkedIn will sell an additional $1 billion in stock.
* Very good half-year figures from Mail.ru.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from Verint.
* Mediocre quarterly results from SAIC.
* Quarterly losses from Ciena and VeriFone.
* The appointments of Eric Hutchinson as CEO of Spirent Communications; and Risto Siilasmaa as interim CEO of Nokia.
* The resignations of Bill Burns, CEO of Spirent Communications; Hannan Carmeli, co-CEO of ClickSoftware; and Stephen Elop, CEO of Nokia (returning to Microsoft).
* An IPO filing from Appyea, a start-up engaged in the acquisition, purchase, maintenance and creation of mobile software applications.

* International:
* Resolution on the privatisation of Dell.
* The possible sell-off by Telecom Italia of a stake to either AT&T or the Egyptian tycoon, Naguib Sawiris.
* Africa:
* Further expansion into Africa by Metrofile.
* South Africa:
* Further developments regarding the reorganisation of Telkom SA.
* Further news regarding the possible acquisition of Neotel.

A more refined, succinct and meaningful broadband policy will be issued within the next three months.

* Worldwide spending on public cloud services will reach $47.4 billion this year and is expected to grow to more than $107 billion by 2017, according to IDC.
* MEA tablet shipments surpassed the region's portable PC market for the first time in Q2, reaching a total of 2.79 million units, a 208% increase from Q2 2012, according to IDC.
* Global mobile phone volumes will reach 2.3 billion in 2017 and are set to pass the one billion mark this year, according to IDC.
* The total number of mobile phone users in Africa will grow to 1.25 billion over the next five years, and the number of LTE subscribers in Africa will grow to 51.2 million by the end of 2018, according to ABI Research.
* The African mobile market is set to grow at an annual rate of 21.27% from 2013 through to 2020, when the market is expected to be $234 billion in size, four times its size this year, according to Manifest Mind.

* JSE All share index: Up 1.4%
* Nasdaq: Up 2%
* NYSE (Dow): Up 0.8%
* Top SA share movements: ConvergeNet Holdings (-20%), Digicore (-13.5%), Huge Group (+33.3%), Jasco (+18.8%), Labat Africa (-34.8%), MICROmega Holdings (+80%), Morvest Business Group (-20.8%), SecureData (-21.1%), Sekunjalo (+18%) and Silverbridge Holdings (+30%)

The 2013/2014 Global Competitiveness Report was published last week and showed SA had lost its number one position in Sub-Saharan Africa, which it received in 2008, to Mauritius. The following are some of the rankings (there were 148 countries involved):

* 1: Switzerland
* 2: Singapore
* 3: Finland
* 4: Germany
* 5: US
* 6: Sweden
* 7: Hong Kong
* 8: Netherlands
* 9: Japan
* 10: UK
* 29: China
* 45: Mauritius
* 53: SA
* 56: Brazil
* 60: India
* 64: Russian Federation
* 66: Rwanda
* 74: Botswana
* 90: Namibia
* 93: Zambia
* 96: Kenya