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BlackBerry to go private?

The Fairfax Financial Holdings-led consortium has proposed a $4.7 billion acquisition of the company.

Paul Booth
By Paul Booth
Johannesburg, 30 Sept 2013

The key stories in the international ICT market last week were the proposed privatisation bid for BlackBerry and a handful of IPOs on Nasdaq.

At home, it was a quiet week.

Key local news

* Good year-end figures from Poynting, with revenue up 15.8% and profit up 36%.
* Satisfactory year-end figures from FoneWorx, with revenue up 8.9% and profit up 11%.
* A full-year loss from Digicore, although revenue up 2.2%.
* Positive trading updates from Altron, Datacentrix and Gijima.
* Sentech has been given a clean audit for the first time in over 10 years. In the year that closed in March 2013, it had a 20% rise in operating profit to R177 million.
* Zaptronix, which de-listed from AltX in April, has filed for business rescue.
* Frank Heydenrych, an ICT journalist and previous editor of ComputerWeek, died last week.

Key African news

* Orascom Telecom (Egypt) has changed its name to Global Telecom Holding.
* The appointment of Mark Nutt as Symantec's VP for EMEA partner management.

Key international news

Sentech has been given a clean audit for the first time in over 10 years.

* Alibaba acquired Kanbox, a Chinese operator of a cloud storage service that is similar to Dropbox.
* Applied Materials bought Tokyo Electron, in a move that creates an electronics manufacturer valued at about $29 billion. It will be one of the world's largest semiconductor and flat panel display manufacturers and will speed up the creation of new technologies for smartphones. The deal was worth $10 billion.
* Axiata Group, Malaysia's largest telecom company, purchased PT AXIS Telekom Indonesia for $865 million.
* eBay acquired Braintree, a payment gateway, for $800 million.
* The Canadian-based Fairfax Financial Holdings-led consortium (a shareholder) has proposed a $4.7 billion acquisition of BlackBerry, in a move that will take the latter private. This is a far cry from the $83 billion market capitalisation that BlackBerry 'enjoyed' a few years ago.
* KKR, a private equity company, bought the healthcare business of Panasonic.
* Telefonica made an additional $1.2 billion investment in Telecom Italia and its South American business, in a way that precludes the former having to launch a full takeover bid.
* The Marvell Technology Group has failed to overturn a $1.17 billion jury verdict regarding infringements of patents held by Carnegie Mellon University.
* The US ITC has handed down a preliminary verdict against HTC for the violation of Nokia patents.
* Alibaba has abandoned its plan to list in Hong Kong and is now looking at a US share sale.
* Good quarterly numbers from Jabil Circuit and Red Hat.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from Accenture, Progress Software and Synnex.
* Quarterly losses from BlackBerry (also, revenue down 49%).
* Paul Galant was appointed as CEO of VeriFone.
* Disappointing IPOs on Nasdaq by Applied Optoelectronics, a provider of fibre-optic networking products; and Violin Memory, a maker of SSD storage.
* A good IPO on Nasdaq by Covisint, a provider of cloud-based software that helps an organisation to connect, engage and collaborate with an external audience.
* A satisfactory IPO on Nasdaq by Montage Technology Group, a Chinese fabless provider of analogue and mixed-signal semiconductor solutions.

Look out for

* International:
* The possible merger of Alcatel-Lucent with Nokia.
* The possible resignation of Franco Bernabe, the executive chairman of Telecom Italia.

* South Africa:
* Further developments regarding Telkom.
* Further developments regarding the report on the ex-Department of Communications minister, Dina Pule.

Research results and predictions

* Sixty-four percent of organisations have invested or are planning to invest this year in big data technology, according to Gartner.
* Smartphone shipments to Africa were up 21.5% in Q2, with Samsung dominating the market with a 52.1% share, according to IDC.
* Worldwide shipments of production printers were up 15% in Q2 to 13 000 units, according to IDC. MEA had a 16.6% growth, and Xerox remained the number one player.

Stock market changes

* JSE All share index: Up 0.6% (highest-ever weekend close)
* Nasdaq: Up 0.2% (highest close this year)
* NYSE (Dow): Down 1.2%
* Top SA share movements: AdaptIT (+8.6%), ConvergeNet Holdings (+20%), Digicore (+9.3%), Gijima (+32.9%), ISA (-7.8%), Jasco (-14.7%), Mustek (+10.6%) and TCS (+100%)

Final word

Fortune magazine has published its annual listing of its '100 Fastest Growing Companies'. From a technology perspective, the following were included:

* 4: 3D systems, a maker of 3D printers
* 8: Photonics, a manufacturer of high-power lasers
* 19: Ultratech, a semiconductor equipment maker
* 26: Baidu, China's 'Google'
* 38: Apple
* 66: Ixia, a cyber security player
* 69: Cirrus Logic, a supplier of audio chips
* 73: Zygo, a maker of precision optical equipment
* 76: KLA-Tencor, a semiconductor manufacturer
* 84: Semtech, a semiconductor maker
* 90: CommVault Systems, a data management company
* 96: Rackspace Hosting, a data storage company

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