Dell goes private

The international ICT market was dominated last week by two multibillion-dollar deals: the privatisation of Dell (worth $24.4 billion) and the Liberty Global offer for Virgin Media (worth $16 billion).

At home, the news that SA will miss the international analogue TV cut-off date in 2015 stole much of the local ICT media space.

* Good interim numbers from Jasco, with revenue up 11.8% and profit up 20.7%.
* Mixed half-year figures from Net 1 UEPS Technologies, with revenue up 16% but profit down 77%.
* Positive trading updates from Mustek, Mvelaserve and Vodacom.
* Negative trading updates from Morvest Business Group and Silverbridge Holdings.
* MTN said its subsidiary, MTN Dubai, has acquired the 50% owned by Amaracos Holdings in MTN Cyprus, raising MTN's stake in the latter to 100%.
* SA is not going to meet the international deadline (mid-2015) for moving off analogue TV onto a digital standard. At this 2015 date, the ITU will stop protecting analogue broadcasts.
* Renewed JSE cautionaries by Morvest Business Group and TCS.
* The appointment of Nick Vlok as interim CEO of Digicore.
* The resignation of Barney Esterhuyzen, CEO of Digicore.

* Econet Wireless Zimbabwe now owns most of TN Bank (almost 98%).
* Microsoft announced its 4Afrika initiative, aimed at boosting Africa's economy by up-skilling 200 000 Africans in IT fields, and putting one million SMEs online in the next three years. An initial $70 million has been committed for this project.
* Sage has opened an office in Lagos, Nigeria.

SA is not going to meet the international deadline for moving off analogue TV.

* Avanade, a joint venture between Accenture and Microsoft, acquired Opstera, a cloud start-up.
* Charter Communications bought Cablevision's western cable systems, known as Optimum West, for $1.63 billion.
* Google purchased the ICG Group's partly-owned Channel Intelligence, its marketing services unit, for $125 million.
* Jabil Circuit acquired Nypro, a maker of precision plastic products, for $665 million.
* Liberty Global bought Virgin Media for $16 billion. The deal is the largest media transaction since 2007, when Thomson Reuters was created. It puts Liberty Global in a dead heat with Comcast, the world's largest cable company.
* Oracle purchased Acme Packet, a network gear maker, for $2.1 billion.
* Twitter acquired Bluefin Labs, a social TN analytics company.
* The announcement in Australia that Google is not responsible for the content of third-party advertisements displayed in Web searches.
* A Chicago judge dismissed legal claims filed by Cisco against a licensing company, Innovatio IP Ventures.
* A US judge found that parts of three of Google's Motorola Mobility unit patents are invalid.
* One of Apple's investors filed a lawsuit regarding its cash pile and the possible payout to shareholders.
* A federal appeal court outcome regarding how far the patent system should go in protecting software inventions.
* Bharti Airtel has bought out Alcatel-Lucent's share in their joint venture in India, but will continue to operate independently from Airtel. The new entity will be run by Shishir Kumar, who is currently CEO of Bharti Airtel Upper North.
* Dell is to go private, in a $24.4 billion deal, the largest leveraged buyout since the financial crisis. The deal involves cash from Michael Dell and one of his affiliate investment vehicles; and Silver Lake Partners; a$4 billion loan from Microsoft; and debt financing from a number of financial institutions. The deal provides an opportunity for its owner, Michael Dell, to be more flexible in managing the company.
* The Intelsat 27 satellite failed to launch.
* Excellent quarterly results from LinkedIn.
* Very good quarterly figures from Baidu.
* Good quarterly numbers from Akamai Technologies, ARM Holdings, Arris Group (back in the black), Cognizant Technology Solutions, Dassault Systemes, Gartner and Teradata.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from AOL, BCE, Belden, CSC (back in the black) and United Micro Electronics.
* Mediocre quarterly results from Genpact, HTC and Vodafone.
* Mixed quarterly figures from ADP, with revenue up but profit down; Arrow Electronics, with revenue down but profit up; Equifax, with revenue up but profit down; Fiserv, with revenue down but profit up; Guidance Software, with revenue up but profit down; Interactive Intelligence, with revenue up but profit down; Riverbed Technology, with revenue up but profit down; and Sohu, with revenue up but profit down.
* Quarterly losses from Alcatel-Lucent, Atmel, Bottomline Technologies, Imperva, KPN, NCR, Nuance Communications, Sony, Sprint Nextel, STMicroelectronics and Zynga.
* The resignations of Jameel Abdullah al-Molhern, CEO of Saudi Telecom's domestic operations; and Ben Verwaayen, CEO of Alcatel-Lucent. The former move comes soon after the resignations of the group and international CEOs of the group late last year, following one-time write-downs of the group's investments in Cell C and Aircel.

* International:
* The possible $15 billion+ buyout of EE, the UK's largest mobile phone operator, by private equity investors; although the owners, Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom, still see an IPO as their preferred option.
* The possible buy-in to Nokia Siemens Networks by Alcatel-Lucent, maybe via buying Siemens' stake.
* Africa:
* New initiatives by Jasco in Africa.
* South Africa:
* Further developments regarding Telkom's future and the US investigation regarding Net 1 UEPS Technologies.

* More than 50% of mobile applications deployed by 2016 will be hybrid, according to Gartner.
* By the end of 2015, more than 50% of new retail customer identities will be based on social network identities, according to Gartner.
* Worldwide mobile data traffic will increase 13-fold over the next four years, according to Cisco, reaching 11.2 exabytes per month by 2017. This is 66% CAGR and is partly due to the continued growth in the number of mobile Internet connections, which will exceed the world's population by 2017.

* JSE All share index: Up 0.7% (highest-ever weekend close)
* Nasdaq: Up 0.5% (highest weekend close for over a decade)
* Top SA share movements: AdaptIT (+10.8%), Altech (-15.3%), BCX (+10.2%), ConvergeNet Holdings (-8.7%), Morvest (-10%), Muvoni (+10%), Mvelaserve (+9.1%), Net UEPS Technologies (+16.4%), Poynting (+9.9%) and SecureData (+18.8%)

Fortune magazine has published its annual '100 Best Companies to Work For' list. From a technology perspective, the following are the leaders:

* 1: Google
* 2: SAS
* 6: NetApp
* 9: Ultimate Software
* 11: Qualcomm
* 19: Salesforce.com
* 22: Intuit

Also included in the list are Accenture, Autodesk, Cisco, Hitachi Data Systems, Intel and Microsoft, ie, few of the big boys such as Amazon, Apple, AT&T or any other telecommunications company. Also missing are Dell, Facebook, HP, IBM, Oracle and Xerox.