Last week was extremely quiet both at home and abroad. Some news included Palm announcing a new CEO, and Paracon's acquisition of IC Blue Technologies.
Key local news of the past week
* Excellent year-end figures from Amecor, with revenue up 227% and profit up 88%.
* Good year-end figures from Mix Telematics, with revenue up 39% and profit up over 10%.
* Mixed year-end figures from Labat Africa, with revenue well down but profit up significantly, mainly as a result of the TCS unbundling transaction.
* Paracon acquired the resourcing interests of IC Blue Technologies, a provider of IT resources and services, for R20.7 million.
* Simo Lushaba was named chairman of Spescom, and Matthews Phosa was appointed non-executive chairman of Alliance Mining.
* Mutle Mogase resigned as chairman of Spescom.
Key African news
* The East African Marine Systems (Teams) fibre-optic undersea cable was officially launched in Kenya, and includes Altech among its shareholders.
* Cable & Wireless has joined the West Africa Cable System consortium.
* Africa Finance Corporation (Nigeria) will fund $66 million of the $240 million Main-One undersea cable from Portugal to Nigeria.
* Angola Telecom has partnered with four private companies to launch a joint venture, Angola Cable, to build and manage a fibre-optic network to connect Angola with various other African countries and Europe.
Key international news
* AOL acquired Going and Patch Media, two online media companies.
* Microsoft's IP Ventures unit has spun-off its software licensing and protection services business into a Dublin-based business called InishTech, a collaboration between Microsoft and Enterprise Ireland.
* Quarterly losses from National Semiconductor.
* Jon Rubinstein was appointed CEO of Palm. Rubinstein was the computer engineer credited with building both the iPod and Palm Pre.
* Ed Colligan, CEO of Palm, resigned.
Look out for
Possible deals include:
* International:
* The investment by Walt Disney's investment arm in MIRS communications, an Israeli mobile network operator that is owned by Motorola.
* A joint venture that would bring together Sprint Nextel's long distance network with Level 3 Communications.
* A investment by France Telecom in India's Aircel.
* A sell-off by the Icelandic government of its stake in Og Vodafone (Iceland).
* Africa:
* A sell-off by Kuwait's MTC of Zain. The company has had bids from American, European, Chinese and Indian companies.
* South Africa:
* The merger of Remgro and Venfin, which has a substantial technology portfolio.
* The purchase by Naspers' MIH Allegro, the Polish subsidiary of MIH, of the Polish financial portal, Bankier.pl. Allegro is the leading e-commerce platform in eastern Europe.
Research results and predictions
* Worldwide storage software revenue for Q109 declined 5.2% to $2.8 billion, reports IDC. Symantec was the only one of the top five vendors that increased its revenue, and narrowed the gap between itself and EMC, which remains at number one.
* Worldwide PC shipments declined 6.8% in Q109, according to IDC.
* Worldwide IT services revenue grew 8.2% in 2008 to $806 billion, reports Gartner. Of the top five companies, Accenture had the largest growth at 15.1%.
Stock market changes
* JSE All share index: Down 1.1%
* Nasdaq: Up 0.5% (highest weekend close this year)
* Top SA share movements: AdaptIT (-19%), Amecor (+21.2%), Blue Label Telecoms (+18.8%), Dynamic Cables (-37.1%), Faritec (-14.3%), Labat Africa (+50%), Mix Telematics (+56.7%), Silverbridge (+16.7%), Simeka (+20.7%), UCS (+15.6%) and Zaptronix (-25%)
Final word
Africa Finance Corporation (Nigeria) will fund $66 million of the $240 million Main-One undersea cable from Portugal to Nigeria.
Paul Booth, MD, Global Research Partners
Every year, US-based Software Magazine publishes its Software 500. This year, for the first time, it has published the Next 100 and identified the top 10 by revenue growth within this group. The top three within this specific subset are Canadian Diversinet, which provides solutions for securing and provisioning mobile business applications in healthcare and financial services; Israeli SecureLogic, which develops and markets systems that manage the movement of people and baggage through airports; and Canadian Acceleware, which develops and markets software acceleration products.
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