IBM indulges in retail therapy

In international news, the quarterly financial results flooded in last week, containing a few positive surprises. IBM's acquisition of SPSS also took centre stage. At home, the ICT market was extremely quiet and awaiting further news regarding the finalisation of the MTN/Bharti deal.

* A full-year loss from Beget Holdings, although revenue up 77%.
* Mixed year-end figures from Simeka, with revenue up 29%, but profit down 3%.
* Net1 UEPS acquired R106 million (16.9%) of its shares held by Brait SA and its investment affiliates.
* Lenore Kerrigan was named SA country manager for Tibco; and Fanie van Rensburg was appointed CEO of Faritec. The latter was MD of Shoden Data Systems, which he co-founded in 2000.

* Good Q2 figures from Mobinil (Egypt).
* Satisfactory H1 figures from Maroc Telecom.
* Africell Holding, a mobile operator in Sierra Leone, bought Millicom's Sierra Leone subsidiary, which operates as Tigo.
* The Angolan government is to sell 80% of the country's second-largest phone company, Movicel.
* Ramachandran Balachandran was appointed CEO of Visafone (Nigeria).
* Ninan Thomas resigned as CEO of Visafone.

Microsoft and Yahoo have agreed to a search deal that could create a rival to Google.

Paul Booth, MD, Global Research Partners

* Agilent, the company formed when the instrumentation arm of HP was hived-off several years ago, purchased Varian, a rival that has annual revenue in excess of $1 billion. The deal was worth $1.5 billion.
* Alcatel-Lucent acquired UK-based Velocix, a provider of content delivery network infrastructure and services to Internet and broadband service providers.
* IBM bought Ounce Labs, a software company that helps organisations reduce the risks and costs associated with security and compliance concerns.
* IBM also acquired SPSS, a developer of business analytics technology, for $1.2 billion. SPSS, listed on Nasdaq, has annual revenue of about $300 million.
* Sprint Nextel bought Virgin Mobile USA for $483 million. Virgin has disposed of several of its mobile operations around the world, especially those not performing well. I wonder if the SA operation is on its disposal list?
* Time Warner purchased Google's 5% stake in AOL for $283 million. This move paves the way for Time Warner to spin-off AOL as a separate company. AOL has been making losses on a regular basis since it merged with Time Warner in 2001. Google originally acquired its stake in AOL for $1 billion in late 2005.
* Hitachi will buy out minority shareholders in five of its 16 units and convert them to wholly owned subsidiaries. This is likely to cost Hitachi $2.87 billion.
* Microsoft and Yahoo have agreed to a search deal that could create a rival to Google.
* Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics and SK Telecom, together with other South Korean companies, will develop semiconductors for smartphones and digital TV sets.
* Very good quarterly figures from Verizon Wireless.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from Belgacom, Informatica, Reliance Communications, Rogers Communications, SK Telecom and Softbank.
* Mediocre quarterly results from Adaptec, Ariba (back in the black), Arrow Electronics, Canon, Forrester Research, France Telecom, Global Crossing (back in the black), Ingram Micro, NTT DoCoMo, Pitney Bowes, Plantronics, Symantec, Tata Communications, Time Warner, TSMC, Unisys (back in the black) and Western Digital.
* Mixed quarterly figures from ADP (revenue down, but profit up), Alcatel-Lucent (revenue down, but back in the black - first profit since the merger), BT Group (revenue up, but profit down), Bull (revenue up, but profit down), Check Point Software Technologies (revenue up, but profit down), HTC (revenue up, but profit down), Iron Mountain (revenue down, but profit up), McAfee (revenue up, but profit down), MicroStrategy (revenue down, but profit up), Patni Computer Systems (revenue down, but profit up), Qwest Communications (revenue down, but profit up), SAP(revenue down, but profit up), Telefonica (revenue down, but profit up) and Verizon Communications (revenue up, but profit down).
* Very poor quarterly figures from Motorola.
* Quarterly losses from Alvarion, Eastman Kodak, Epicor, Flextronics, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Infineon, Kyocera, Level 3 Communications, NEC, NetSuite, Sanyo, Sharp, Sony, Sprint Nextel, STMicroelectronics, Tata Teleservices Maharashtra and Toshiba.
* Kris Hagerman was appointed CEO of Corel.
* Tzvika Friedman resigned as CEO of Alvarion.

* International:
* Further developments following the 'search' tie-up by Microsoft and Yahoo.
* Africa:
* The bid winner for LinkdotNet, a subsidiary of Orascom Telecom. The five bidders include Mobinil, Telecom Egypt and Vodafone Egypt.
* The sell-off by the Zambian government of 75% of Zamtel to a private investor, and the floatation of the remaining 25%.
* The disinvestment by Zain Tanzania of its 35% stake in TTCL, the government incumbent.
* The possible buy-in to Essar Group's Kenyan subsidiary by BSNL (India).
* South Africa:
* The possible future of Virgin Mobile SA (see above).

* The worldwide mobile phone market declined 10.8% in Q209 to 269.6 million units, reports IDC.

* JSE All share index: Up 1.3% (highest weekend close since September 2008)
* Nasdaq: Up 0.6% (highest weekend close since September 2008)
* Top SA share movements: AdaptIT (+12.5%), African Cellular Towers (+21.7%), Ansys (+10%), Beget Holdings (+50%), FoneWorx (+23.4%), Metrofile (-12.7%), Net1 UEPS (+18.3%), SilverBridge (+17.9%) and Stella Vista (-50%)

The Wall Street Journal recently had an article addressing the move for users using Windows XP to Windows 7, which is being released in October. In essence, and the recommendation from Microsoft itself, is that users should buy a new machine with Windows 7 pre-installed! It seems any 'transition' will be painful, as users will initially have to wipe out everything on their hard disk in order to install the new operating system. Ouch!