Companies on the comeback trail

The international ICT world was quiet last week, apart from a flood of quarterly results. Dell and Nokia Siemens Networks were among a handful of companies that made acquisitions.

At home, Pinnacle's acquisition of Axiz stole much of the local ICT headline space.

* A positive trading update from Vodacom.
* EOH bought Think iT Solutions, a provider of IT solutions.
* Pinnacle Technology acquired Axiz Technology for R170.9 million, to create the country's largest distribution company.
* ICASA has delayed its auction for various spectrum licences.
* Dingane Dube was appointed acting CEO of Sentech; Phineas Moleele was named CEO of USAASA; and Harold Wesso was appointed acting DG of the Department of Communications.
* Brian van Rooyen resigned as chairman of Labat Africa.
* Mamodupi Mohlala, DG of the Department of Communications, was axed.

* The MainOne fibre-optic cable that runs from Portugal to Lagos (Nigeria) debuted. The cable currently has landing points in Ghana and Nigeria, but will have branching units that will serve Canary Islands, Ivory Coast, Morocco and Senegal.
* Bob Collymore was appointed CEO of Safaricom.
* Michael Joseph retired as CEO of Safaricom.

ICASA has delayed its auction for various spectrum licences.

Paul Booth, MD, Global Research Partners

* Dell purchased Ocarina Networks, a provider of storage optimisation technology that includes compression and deduplication.
* Nokia Siemens Networks bought Motorola's mobile network infrastructure business for $1.2 billion.
* Excellent quarterly results from Baidu and SanDisk.
* Very good quarterly figures from Apple, EMC, F5 Networks, Informatica, Juniper Networks, LG Display and STMicroelectronics (back in the black), Texas Instruments, VMware and Xerox.
* Good quarterly numbers from Canon Electronics, Check Point Software Technologies, Flextronics (back in the black), Hynix Semiconductor (back in the black), Millicom Cellular International, Microsoft, NCR, Netgear (back in the black), Philips Electronics, Seagate Technology (back in the black), Tyco Electronics (back in the black), Western Digital and Wipro.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from Amdocs, AT&T, CA Technologies, IBM, Sybase, Telenor and Yahoo.
* Mediocre quarterly results from Etisalat.
* Mixed quarterly figures from Autonomy, with revenue up but profit down; Ericsson, with revenue down but profit up; Idea Cellular (India), with revenue up but profit down; Nokia, with revenue up but profit down; Qualcomm, with revenue down but profit up; Saudi Telecom, with revenue up but profit down; TeliaSonera, with revenue down but profit up; and TomTom, with revenue down but profit up.
* Quarterly losses from Rambus, ST Ericsson and Verizon Communications.
* Eli Harari, CEO and founder of SanDisk, retired.
* An IPO filing by IntraLinks, a software services provider, for a listing on the NYSE.

International:
* More acquisitions from EMC, particularly in the software areas of data storage, security and virtualisation.
* A new CEO for Nokia.

Africa:
* The possible entry of Digicel into the African market.

South Africa:
* A BBBEE transaction from Business Connexion.

* Annual netbook shipments will more than double by 2013, with 60 million units being shipped this year, according to ABI Research.

* JSE All share index: Up 3.2%
* Nasdaq: Up 4.1%
* Top SA share movements: Beget Holdings (-33.3%), Cape Empowerment Trust (-15%), Labat Africa (-8.4%), Poynting Antennas (+46.2%), Silverbridge (-15.2%), Spescom (+17.5%), Stella Vista (+20%) and TeleMasters (-15.3%)

Fortune magazine has published its annual Global 500 listing. From a technology perspective, the top 10 players are AT&T (21), Deutsche Telekom (59), Hitachi (47), HP (26), IBM (48), LG (67), NTT (44), Panasonic (65), Samsung Electronics (45) and Verizon Communications (35).

I will provide further analysis next week.