KKR gets listed

The international ICT market was quiet again last week, ahead of the flood of quarterly results expected soon. There were a handful of acquisitions, including one from EMC, making the main news.

At home, the interim CEO appointment at Telkom SA and the BEE investment in Atos Origin SA stole much of the local headline ICT space.

* Jerome McClement acquired Titan5 Holdings' PCMall, which is being positioned to become the top computer reseller on the Internet in SA.

* AIH and Manteo Investments made a 26% investment in the South African subsidiary of Atos Origin, a French IT services company.

* Linux Systems Dynamics, an open source consulting company, was named Red Hat's premier business partner for southern Africa.

* Lorna Hardie was appointed HP Networking country manager for South Africa; and Jeffery Hedberg was named interim CEO of Telkom SA.

* The Mozambican telecommunications regulatory body said Movitel (Vietnam-based), TMN SA (the mobile phone operation of Portugal Telecom) and Uni-Telecom CM (a joint venture between Angola-based Unitel and Mozambique's Energia Capital) have been short-listed for that country's third mobile phone licence.

* Derek Wiggill was appointed HP Networking country manager for Africa.

* Tim Lowry resigned as VP for the South and East Africa region of MTN.

* ADP bought Cobalt, an Internet marketing company, for $400 million.

* Blackboard, a software provider to the education industry, purchased Elluminate and Wimba; their technologies allow educational institutions to hold synchronous live courses over the Web. The deal was worth $116 million.

* EMC acquired Greenplum, a provider of disruptive data warehousing technology.

* Hexagon AB (Sweden) bought Intergraph, an engineering and software firm renowned for its CAD software, for $2.13 billion.

* Ingram Micro purchased Asiasoft Hong Kong in a move designed to grow its international sales of business software.

* Logitech acquired Paradial AS, a Norway-based provider of firewall and network address translation traversal solutions for video communications.

* Renesas Electronics purchased Nokia's wireless modem business for $200 million.

* Synchronoss Technologies, a communications software maker, bought FusionOne, a direct competitor, for $40 million.

Jeffery Hedberg was named interim CEO of Telkom SA.

Paul Booth, MD, Global Research Partners

* Quadrangle Group is auctioning off its ownership of rural cable and broadband provider, Hargay Communications Group, in a sale that could raise as much as $400 million.

* Excellent quarterly results from Fuji Electronics.

* Very good quarterly figures from HTC.

* Mixed quarterly figures from Lawson Software, with revenue up but profit down.

* Frans van Houten was appointed president and CEO of Philips Electronics (as from April 2011).

* Gerard Kleisterlee retired as CEO of Philips Electronics (as from April 2011).

International:
* Acquisitions by Fujitsu to bolster its cloud computing thrust.

South Africa:
* The appointment of the new group CEO for MTN.

* The worldwide semiconductor business will grow to $295 billion in 2011 and $340 billion by 2014, a CAGR of 8.8% for the period 2009-2014, according to Gartner.

* JSE All share index: Up 3.6%

* Nasdaq: Up 5%

* Top SA share movements: Amecor (+11.3%), Ansys (-9.5%), Beget Holdings (+50%), Datatec (+10.9%), Dialogue Group (-22.2%), Ideco (-18.4%), Naspers (+9.2%) and Stella Vista (-16.7%)

This week will see the listing on the NYSE of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR), one of the world's largest private equity companies, which is valued by itself at $26 billion. KKR has a major investment in the ICT industry, including stakes in Avago Technologies, Bharti Infratel, Eastman Kodak, First Data, Northgate Information Solutions, NXP Semiconductors, SunGard Data Systems, TDC and Zhone Technologies.