All eyes on Vodacom

There was no major news last week from the international ICT world. However, at home, the Vodacom listing and the resignation of HP SA's country manager stole much of the local ICT media space.

* Very good interim figures from TeleMasters, with revenue up 38% and profit up 43%.
* Mixed interim numbers from Sekunjalo, with revenue down 20% but well back in the black; Spescom, with revenue up slightly but profit down 14%; and UCS, with revenue up 28% but profit down 89%.
* Mixed year-end figures from Vodacom, with revenue up 14.5% but profit down 22.2%. Subscriber numbers were up 16.5% to 39.6 million.
* Negative trading updates from Huge Group, Ideco, Sekunjalo, Stella Vista and Telkom SA.
* Vodacom's successful listing on the JSE.
* The termination of Celcom's AltX listing.
* The appointments of Chose Choeu as president of the Information Technology Association (ITA), and Janette Cumming as vice-president of the ITA.
* The resignation of Oliver Fortuin as country manager of HP South Africa and MD of HP's Technology Services Group.

Look out for the fate of SCO, which is in Chapter 11 and is close to the end of its stay of execution.

Paul Booth, MD, Global Research Partners

* NetApp acquired Data Domain, a provider of deduplication storage systems.
* Zain merged its Jordan operation with Paltel (Palestine).
* The name changes of DST International to DST Global Solutions; and Rackable Systems to Silicon Graphics International.
* Good quarterly numbers from Salesforce.com.
* Satisfactory year-end figures from Cable & Wireless.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from Intuit.
* Mediocre quarterly results from HP and NetApp.
* Mixed year-end numbers from Vodafone, with revenue up but profit down.
* Mixed quarterly figures from Belgacom and CSC.
* Quarterly losses from Brocade and Lenovo.
* The appointments of Ursula Burns as CEO of Xerox; and Paul Donovan (ex-Vodafone) as CEO of Eircom.
* The retirement of Anne Mulcahy, CEO of Xerox.
* A successful IPO on the NYSE by SolarWinds, a provider of powerful, simple and affordable network management software.

* International: The fate of SCO, which is in Chapter 11 and is close to the end of its stay of execution.
* Africa: The consolidation of Vodafone's various interests in Africa.
* South Africa: The possible investment partner for the Huge Group.

* According to Gartner, worldwide mobile phone sales declined 9.4% in Q1 2009, to 269.1 million units.

* JSE All share index: Up 3.3% (highest weekend close in 2009)
* Nasdaq: Up 0.07%
* Top SA share movements: AdaptIT (+38.1%), Ansys (+82.5%), Cape Empowerment Trust (+44.4%), Datatec (+10.7%), Dimension Data (+13.1%), FoneWorx (-27.1%), Labat Africa (+200%), Mustek (+11.1%), TCS (-10%), Telkom SA (-48.7%) and UCS (-12.5%)

Baron's 500, the ranking of the 500 largest Canadian and US public companies, has been published. From a technology perspective, Research In Motion was the highest ranked at number six, followed by Western Digital (7), Oracle (8), Apple (9), Google (14), Qualcomm (15), Microsoft (17) and HP (18).