Oracle looks to the Sun

The news that Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems was the talk of the international town. At home it was a quiet week, broken by some good numbers from Altech and Datacentrix.

* Mixed interim numbers from Vox Telecom, with revenue up 22%, but profit down 28%.
* Good year-end figures from Altech, with revenue up 11% and profit up 42%, and Datacentrix, with revenue up 12% and profit up 18%.

* A full-year loss from Starcomms (Nigeria).
* Vyke Communications, a UK-based telecommunications company, has signed a distribution deal for the MEA region with U2-Soft, a company partially owned by i2 Group, a mobile phone distributor with 19 000 points of sale within the region.

Carphone Warehouse intends to split operations with a view to separately listing its retail and telecommunications interests.

Paul Booth, MD, Global Research Partners

* Broadcom, a provider of semiconductor for wired and wireless communications, bought Emulex, a provider of fibre channel storage networking solutions, for $764 million. Broadcom has annual revenue of $4.7 billion and Emulex annual revenue of $460 million.
* NCR purchased TNR Holdings, a maker of ATMs, store checkout scanners and self-service kiosks.
* Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion. This deal raises many questions, such as the future of Oracle's relationship with HP and the ongoing fate of MySQL.
* Philips Electronics sold off its 17% stake in UK-listed Pace, set-top box maker, for EUR48 million.
* Very good quarterly figures from Autonomy and ZTE.
* Good year-end numbers from Huawei Technologies, with revenue up 43% and profit up 20%.
* Good quarterly numbers from Qatar Telecom (Qtel), VMware and Wipro.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from Apple, China Mobile, Etisalat, Software AG, Sybase and Tata Consultancy Services.
* Mediocre quarterly results from Amdocs, AT&T, EMC, IBM, JDA Software, Lexmark, Microsoft, Saudi Telecom, Western Digital and Yahoo (profit down 78%).
* Mixed quarterly figures from China Telecom (revenue up but profit down), F5 Networks (revenue down but profit up), HCL Technologies (revenue up but profit down), Idea Cellular (India) (revenue up 48% but profit marginally down), Millicom International Cellular (revenue up but profit down), Samsung Electronics (revenue up but profit down) and Xerox (revenue down but back in the black).
* Very poor quarterly figures from Netgear and Texas Instruments (revenue down 36% and profit down 97%).
* Quarterly losses from AMD, AU Optronics, Broadcom, Imation, Juniper Networks, LG Electronics, Logitech, NCR, SanDisk, Seagate Technology and TomTom.
* Alan Bandle (ex Dell) was named CEO of Versatel AG, a German broadband provider; and Owen van Natta was appointed CEO of MySpace, after founder Chris DeWolfe resigned.

* International:
* The acquisition of UK-based PA Consulting by Cognizant Technology Solutions, an IT, consulting and BPO services provider.
* A possible UK listing by Torex Retail.
* A possible buy-out by Carphone Warehouse of Tiscali's UK operation.
* South Africa:
* The sell-off by Sekunjalo of one of its IT businesses.

* Worldwide notebook shipments will exceed 50% of total PC shipments this year, according to the Market Intelligence & Consulting Institute (Taiwan).

* JSE All share index: Down 0.7%
* Nasdaq: Up 1.3% (highest weekend close in 2009)
* Top SA share movements: Ansys (-10.8%), Cape Empowerment Trust (+16.7%), EOH (+11.5%), MICROmega (+11.1%), Mustek (-10.7%), Spescom (-16.9%), TCS (-33.3%) and Vox Telecom (-10%)

African Business recently published its annual Africa's Top Companies listing that is done by market capitalisations. From a technology perspective, MTN was at number four, Itissalat Al Maghrib (Morocco) at number five, Telkom SA at 11, Telecom Egypt at 21 and Orascom Egypt at 22. As in the past, no IT companies outside SA are in the list.