JSE-listed electronics company Reunert has gone ahead with a planned merger of two key business units, Nashua Communications and Nashua ECN, effective as of 1 October.
The two businesses, which will operate under the Nashua Communications brand, will be headed by current Nashua ECN MD Andy Openshaw. Reunert says the new Nashua Communications will turn over R1 billion a year and have a staff complement of about 600.
This follows a series of moves by Reunert over the past year or so, in keeping with its converged communication strategy. Reunert CEO Dave Rawlinson says the rationale behind the merger is that a single team will leverage the range of products and skills to offer converged communication to SA's corporate market.
Tactical trail
Reunert's convergence plan started to take off in full force around the middle of last year, when SA's Competition Tribunal approved the electronics company's buyout of ECN Telecommunications, for R171.9 million.
At the time, Reunert said its plan was to become a fully converged player within a year-and-a-half. As planned, ECN has run as a standalone entity for about a year, while its products and services were immediately integrated. The next step, said the company, would be for ECN to merge with Nashua Communications, to form two collaborative key business units under the latter name.
In November, Reunert announced it had spent a total of R305.5 million on expanding its Nashua portfolio throughout the year, purchasing stakes in the Nashua Tygerberg, Paarl, Durban and Cape Town franchises, along with ECN.
According to Reunert, Nashua Communications operates mainly in the local area networking space, while Nashua ECN has a national IP-based network with points of presence and data centres in all the major metropolitan areas, operating in the voice, data and wide area networking space.
Rawlinson says the new Nashua Communications will be in a position to offer a host of voice, data and hosted solutions bundled together for on-premise, purely cloud or hybrid scenarios.
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