Apple faces US antitrust scrutiny

The international ICT world was quiet last week despite numerous small acquisitions. At home, Wooltru's move into the ICT arena, with the acquisition of the PBT Group, was major news.

* Mediocre year-end figures from Mix Telematics, with revenue down 12% and profit down 4%.
* A full-year loss (R770 million) from Neotel.
* Negative trading updates from Labat Africa and Remgro.
* Digicore bought the remainder of the shares it doesn't already own of MPS 2010 (UK) from Minorplanet Systems.
* Pepkor Retail acquired 54% of ConvergeNet's 74% shareholding in Future Cell, for R66.2 million.
* Wooltru, the investment holding group, purchased the PBT Group, a BI and information management company that owns Stricklands Tetra Cape and 51% of PBT Insurance Technologies. This is a reverse take-over in terms of the listing requirements of the JSE, which will evaluate the continued listing of Wooltru, as if the company was a new applicant. This deal is an all-share deal and worth substantially less than the R5 billion+ price quoted by most newspapers that seem to have assumed a share price of R1! Wooltru's closing share price last week was 8 cents.
* MTN has called off its discussions with Orascom Telecom.
* Fabrice Campoy was named South African country manager of HP's Imaging & Printing Group; and Lidia Ngengebule was appointed South African country manager of HP Enterprise Services.

* Mediocre quarterly results from Starcomms (Nigeria), with revenue down 6.8% and profit also down.
* Vodacom Gateway Mauritius acquired AfriConnect Zambia, Zambia's third-largest ISP.
* LAP Green Networks of Libya has won the bid for the purchase of 75% of Zamtel (Zambia) in a deal valued at $257 million.

Look out for MTN's next move regarding Africa.

Paul Booth, MD, Global Research Partners

* Autonomy bought CA Technology's Information Governance business.
* Check Point Software Technologies purchased Liquid Machines, a data security start-up.
* HgCapital and CPS Partners acquired the Isle of Man telecommunications business previously owned by Telefonica. The deal was worth £130 million.
* HTC (Taiwan) bought Abaxia (France), a company that specialises in developing mobile software for telecommunications network operators and mobile phone makers.
* Pitney Bowes purchased the outstanding shares of Portrait Software, a company that provides software to enhance existing customer relationship management systems. The deal was worth £44.4 million.
* Reliance Industries (India) acquired Infotel Broadband Services (India), a company that has won the rights to high-value radio spectrum in a government auction that closed last week, for $1 billion.
* Synopsys, provider of electronic design automation software and services for semiconductor design, bought Virage Logic, a semiconductor intellectual property provider, for $315 million.
* Synopsys bought some assets of Synfora, a company founded to commercialise PICO (program-in-chip-out) technology developed at HP Lab.
* TPG, a private equity company, purchased Vertafore, a provider of software and services for the insurance industry, for $1.4 billion.
* Trend Micro acquired UK-based humyo, an online storage and data synchronisation company.
* Twitter bought Smallthought Systems, an analytics start-up.
* Apple faces US antitrust scrutiny regarding its restriction that prevents companies such as Google from carrying ads on its iPhone, iPad and iPod.
* Adaptec changed its name to ADPT following the sale of its data storage hardware and software business to PMC-Sierra.

* International:
* The possible investment by AT&T in Reliance Communications (India).
* The possible merger of the mobile phone operations of Fujitsu and Toshiba.
* Africa:
* MTN's next move regarding Africa.
* South Africa:
* The finalisation of the sell-off by Vodacom of its stake in WBS, the owners of iBurst.

* The worldwide software storage market grew 7.2% in Q110 to reach $3 billion, reports IDC.
* The worldwide application development software market grew 2.2% in 2009 to reach $14.9 billion, according to IDC.

* JSE All share index: Up 1.1%
* Nasdaq: Up 1.1%
* Top SA share movements: African Cellular Towers (-11.8%), Ansys (+42.9%), Beget Holdings (-33.3%), ConvergeNet (-12.5%), Mix Telematics (+13.5%), Poynting Antennas (-33.3%), TCS (-25%) and Zaptronix (+33.3%)

Time magazine recently published its listing of the '100 most influential people in the world'. Included in this list were Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple; Robin Li, founder of Baidu; and Tim Westergren, the Internet's music man.