Handful of purchases

The ICT world last week was dominated by a handful of key acquisitions, while the local ICT market was extremely quiet. For the latest set of quarterly financial announcements, good figures came from Datamonitor and Lenovo, but CSC, Getronics, Hitachi and Kodak posted disappointing numbers.

* SanDisk, a flash memory pioneer, swallowed its rival, M-Systems, for $1.37 billion.
* KKR and Silver Lake Partners, two private equity companies, won the bid for Philips` semiconductor division, in a deal valued at EUR6.4 billion.
* Open Text, a content management solutions company, acquired Hummingbird for $489 million.

* Positive trading updates from CompuClearing and Interconnective Solutions.
* A negative trading update from Business Connexion.
* Primedia bought 50.05% of Exactmobile, a mobile content provider.
* GijimaAst bought out from Magoshi Investments the 50% of Thuso Information Technology it did not already own. This R3.8 million deal also includes any claims Magoshi Investments may have against Thuso.
* The appointment of Di King as MD of Satori Group SA.

* The appointments of Darryl Edwards as EMEA president for Nortel Networks and Geoff Goss as CEO of Zimbabwe`s Celsys.
* The appointment of Biodata IT South Africa as the distribution partner for Kaspersky Lab in Sub-Saharan Africa.
* CapRock Communications, a satellite communications provider, opened a support centre in Luanda, Angola.

KKR and Silver Lake Partners won the bid for Philips` semiconductor division, in a deal valued at EUR6.4 billion.

Paul Booth, MD, Global Research Partners

* IBM bought service desk and asset management provider MRO Software for $740 million.
* Job loss announcements from AOL, Eastman Kodak, KongZhong and Sun Microsystems.
* New Horizons Worldwide to re-state its 2003 and 2004 financial results.

* Disc-based data protection is poised to generate over $50 billion in hardware and software purchases through 2010, says IDC.
* Q2 2006 saw a 26.3% decline in the number of handheld units shipped worldwide to 1.4 million devices, says IDC.

* JSE All share index: Up 1.3%
* Nasdaq: Down 0.4%
* Top SA share movements: Altron (-9.3%), Beget Holdings (-20%), DataPro (+10.3%), Digicore (+9.1%), Dynamic Cables (+15.4%), I-Solutions (-13.6%) and Spescom (+15.1%).
* Top international share movements: Alvarion (+29.3%), AirNet Communications (-31.6%), Consolidated Graphics (+24.9%), Eagle Broadband (-21.1%), Epicus Communications (-25%), InfoNow (+27.8%), Intermec (+22.6%), MRO Software (+24.5%), Proxim (-21.1%), Rambus (-27.3%) and Robocom Systems International (-76.5%).

BusinessWeek has published its latest Best Global Brands companies listing. The first six places were the same as last year, but from a technology viewpoint, the major changes came from Dell at 25 (was 21), Eastman Kodak at 70 (62), Google at 24 (38), Motorola at 69 (73), Philips Electronics at 48 (53) and Yahoo at 55 (58).