Local consolidation

Last week was quiet from an ICT perspective, in both a worldwide and local context.

* Vodafone snapped up 67% of India's Hutchison Essar for $13.1 billion.

* Positive trading updates from FoneWorx, GijimaAst and Pinnacle.
* A mixed trading update from Business Connexion.
* African Cellular Towers acquired JK Shelters, a manufacturer and supplier of shelters to the cellular phone tower market.
* Bytes Technology Group purchased Silverminute.
* MyGate Communications bought Entellipay.
* Radio Surveillance Consortium's 30%, R55 million investment in Telkom's Swiftnet unit.
* Corex IT Distribution Dynamics was appointed as distributor of LG optical drives and similar hardware.
* A change in control of Vestor through Trinity Asset Management, which is acting as a nominee for parties still to be named.
* Frost & Sullivan, the international consultancy and research group, opened an office in Cape Town.

* Telkom SA's R138 million bid for Africa Online, an African ISP active in Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Namibia, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
* Malawi will license a second national operator and a third mobile operator.

Frost & Sullivan, the international consultancy and research group, opened an office in Cape Town.

Paul Booth, MD, Global Research Partners

* A positive results announcement from Trend Micro.
* A negative result warning from BearingPoint.
* Job loss announcements from Neteller, Nokia and SanDisk.
* Planned IPOs from Cavium Networks, Shoretel, an IP telephony company and Time Warner Cable.
* A good IPO by Opnext, a networking technology provider.

* Telefonica taking a stake in Telecom Italia.
* BearingPoint selling off its EMEA business to its employees.

* JSE All share index: Up 3.3% (highest-ever weekend close)
* Nasdaq: Up 1.5%
* Top SA share movements: African Cellular Towers (+21.7%), Altron (+9.7%), FoneWorx (+84.6%), Labat Africa (+10.5%), SAB&T Ubuntu (+17.9%). UCS (+15.5%) and Zaptronix (-14.3%)
* Top international share movements: Bell Canada (+83.7%), Daktronics (-19%), Digital Lightwave (+100%), Eagle Broadband (-20.3%), ESS Technologies (+19.8%), Geoworks (-25%), Hittite Microwave (+24.9), MIDGARDXXI (-50%), Proxim (+100%), Techwell (-21.7%), Terayon (+18.9%) and Varian Semiconductor (+19.4%)

In a recent issue of silicon.com, 10 oft-debated areas in mobile and wireless were identified and the question, 'Should you care?', was asked of each of these. The 10 trends were:

1. Fixed-mobile convergence
2. Sales force automation
3. Mobile VOIP
4. M-Payments
5. 3.5G-HSDPA
6. Location-based services
7. Mobile TV
8. Mobile device management
9. M2M
10. Anti-virus

Of the above, mobile TV was ranked the least important, while mobile device management was rated the highest, followed closely by 3.5G-HSDPA and sales force automation.