A slow week

The local and international ICT world experienced a quiet week, with only a handful of announcements, none of which were particularly earth-shattering.

* Mixed Q1 numbers from TeleMasters, with revenue up over 16% but income down.
* Very good Q2 figures from Net-1 UEPS, with revenue up nearly 40% and income up over 50%.
* Positive trading updates from Digicore and FoneWorx.
* The launch in SA of the BT/HP alliance, a partnership that has already achieved a deal with Anglo, which is the biggest success the alliance has had since its initial inception in 2004.
* Axiz was appointed distributor of hard drives for Samsung SA.

* PDC was appointed to distribute Printronix printers into southern Africa.

A new leader in the ICT sector has emerged, that of AT&T.

Paul Booth, MD, Global Research Partners

* AOL acquired Goowy Media, a widget development and analytics tools company.
* BT Group purchased UK-based Fresca, a provider of managed and hosted e-commerce services to retailers and e-tailers.
* Flextronics bought the FRIWO Mobile Power Business unit of CEAG AG, a global market leader for power supplies and chargers for mobile telephones.
* Very good quarterly figures from Softbank.
* Good quarterly numbers from BMC Software, CSC, Epicor, Gartner, Hitachi, Open Text, Perot Systems and SAS.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from BCE, CGI, Cisco and France Telecom.
* Mediocre quarterly results from AOL, Arrow Electronics, BT Group, Corel, EDS, Fiserv, McAfee, NTT and Time Warner.
* Quarterly losses from Alcatel-Lucent, BearingPoint, InFocus, Infineon Technologies AG, Napster and Pitney Bowes.

* JSE All share index: Down 2.8%
* Nasdaq: Down 4.5%
* Top SA share movements: Beget Holdings (-20%), Digicor (+13%), FoneWorx (+16.3%), Ideco (-9%), Ifca Technologies (+25%), Metrofile (-9.3%), SAB&T Ubuntu (+15.8%), Stella Vista (+16.7%) and UCS (-9.1%)

With many of the year-end results now published, a new leader in the ICT sector has emerged - AT&T. Following its acquisition of Bell South and Cingular Wireless, AT&T now has annual revenue of nearly $119 billion. It has surpassed the annual revenue of HP, which in turn had overtaken IBM in the last year. Other result milestones included Nokia breaking through the $50 billion revenue barrier, and Verizon Communications through the $90 billion mark.