Flurry of local results

The international world of ICT was extremely quiet last week. The main news focused on some key quarterly numbers that saw Cisco returning good figures, Deutsche Telekom and NTT returning mediocre figures, and losses emanating from Adaptec, Alcatel-Lucent and Borland Software.

On the local ICT front, the main news also centred on the flurry of local results that were released, most of which were very positive.

* Very good maiden annual numbers from SAB&T Ubuntu Holdings.
* Very good interim figures from Paracon, with both revenue and profit up over 25%.
* Good year-end numbers from Altron, with revenue up 23% and profit up 45%.
* Good interim figures from Dimension Data, with revenue and profit up over 10%.
* Mediocre interim numbers from Trematon.
* Good quarterly numbers from Net-1 UEPS, with revenue and income both up over 10%.
* Kagiso Trust Investments announced a 20% stake in SilverBridge.
* US-based Iron Mountain looks to acquire Metrofile.
* Unisys SA launched IT Naledi, its Cape-based BEE service centre company.
* A shortlist was created for the purchase of arivia.kom, which seems to include Accenture, Business Connexion, Dimension Data, Siemens Business and T-Systems.
* Hein Engelbrecht was appointed MD of Mecer, and Tebogo Mogashoa was appointed acting chairman of Beget Holdings.
* Dean Barkhuizen, MD of Mecer, resigned.

* The death of Campbell Utton, CEO of MTN Cameroon, in a Kenya Airways plane crash.
* British Telecoms appointed Luis Alvarez as its EMEA president.

It is interesting to note there are no IT companies from outside SA in the [Top 500 Companies] list.

Paul Booth, MD, Global Research Partners

* SAP AG acquired OutlookSoft, a developer of budgeting and financial forecasting software.
* The appointments of Pete Childers as CEO of Zmanda, an open source backup and recovery software vendor; Jeffrey Jacobson as CEO of Presstek, a digital imaging company; Satoshi Miura as CEO of NTT; Simon Moate as CEO of office2office, an office products supplier; and Michael Ricci as president and CEO of Ikanos Communications, a broadband solutions provider.
* The resignations of Chandler Kent, founder and CEO of Zmanda (stays on as CTO); Ravi Kumar, founder and CTO of ISoft, a healthcare software developer; Edward Marino, CEO of Presstek; and Norio Wada, CEO of NTT.
* Positive results announcements from DataMirror and HP.
* Negative result warnings from Finisar and QAD.
* A job loss announcement from AMD.

* JSE All share index: Up 0.08% (highest-ever weekend close)
* Nasdaq: Down 0.4%
* Top SA share movements: African Cellular Towers (+12.5%), Beget Holdings (+60%), BTG (+11.4%), Control (+11.2%), Cyberhost (+20%), Dialogue (+22.5%), Paracon (+24.4%), Sekunjalo (+11.8%), Stella Vista (-16.7%) and Vestor (+20%)
* Top international share movements: Actions Semiconductor (-18.8%), APAC Customer Services (-21.4%), Aviza Technology (-23.2%), BroadVision (+22.2%), Cicero (+68.3%), Sapiens (+20.9%) and Silverline Technologies (+31.4%)

The latest edition of The Africa Report has been published, and contains its annual Top 500 Companies rankings, using turnover as the rank criterion. From a technology perspective, it is interesting to note there are no IT companies from outside SA in the list. The highest ICT company was Telkom SA at number seven, and the highest non-SA company was Orascom Telecom at 23.