Iliad ready for Sprint to the finish

The international ICT market was very quiet last week, with some small acquisitions by some of the majors being the main stories.

At home, the buyout of Gyft and the executive reshuffles at MTN were the main local activities of another quiet week.

* Positive trading updates from Adapt IT and Huge Group.
* US-based First Data acquired Gyft, the online gift card service that was founded by Vinny Lingham, a South African entrepreneur, in January 2012. The deal was worth more than $54 million.
* UCS Technology Services, a BCX company, bought the SME division of Argility, a provider of retail solutions.
* FoneWorx made a 35% investment in BMI Research.
* Huge Group said a settlement has been reached with MTN regarding their dispute.
* The Mr Price Group has launched its mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), called MRP Mobile. It is the second MVNO in SA; Virgin Mobile is the first.
* Orange intends to launch its own-branded retail stores in SA, and an ISP.
* A renewed JSE cautionary by ConvergeNet Holdings.
* A withdrawn JSE cautionary by Huge Group.
* The appointments of Fred Baumhart as SA country manager of VMware; Zunaid BulBulia as group chief operating executive of MTN (was CEO of MTN SA); Ahmed Farroukh as CEO of MTN SA; and Thapeli Matsuba as CEO of DataProof Communications.

* A quarterly loss from Bharti Airtel's African operations, although revenue up 17.5%.
* Rwanda has switched off analogue TV, the second African nation to do so. Tanzania was the first.

US-based First Data acquired Gyft, the online gift card service that was founded by Vinny Lingham.

* Apple acquired BookLamp, a book recommendation service; as well as Concept.io, a provider of an audio news services for smartphones and iOS devices to inform and entertain listeners by serving content that matches their interests.
* BlackBerry bought Secusmart, a German encryption company.
* Cavium purchased Xpliant, a provider of high performance, high density switch silicon.
* Ericsson acquired MetraData in a move designed to accelerate cloud and enterprise billing capabilities of the former.
* j2 Global bought Contactology, a provider of e-mail marketing services.
* Nokia purchased part of Panasonic's wireless-networks unit.
* Oracle acquired TOA Technologies, a provider of cloud-based field services solutions.
* Palantir Technologies bought Poptip, a company that analyses data, from Twitter.
* Sapiens purchased KPI, the owner of 'The Decision Model' patent and a decision management consultancy firm.
* Shaw Communications acquired ViaWest, a provider of co-location, cloud and managed services, for $1.2 billion.
* Twitter bought Madbits, a small image-search company; and Mitro, a security password firm.
* Web.com purchased Scoot, a provider of Internet services and online marketing solutions.
* Alibaba made a $120 million investment in Kabam, a mobile gaming company.
* Microsoft is suing Samsung regarding patent royalties.
* The Chinese regulator is undertaking an anti-monopoly probe of Microsoft.
* Overland Storage has settled its dispute with BDT Media Automation.
* Iliad SA (France) has entered the bidding battle for T-Mobile US against Sprint.
* Excellent quarterly results from Inotera Memory and Yelp (back in the black).
* Very good quarterly figures from American Tower; Arris Group (back in the black), Kulicke and Soffa; LAM Research; and OpenText.
* Good quarterly numbers from Akamai, Bharti Airtel, Equinix (back in the black), IPG Photonics, Microchip Technology, Sharp (back in the black), T-Mobile USA (back in the black) and United Microelectronics.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from ADP, Amkor Technology, Anixter International, Arrow Electronics, AU Optronics, Black Box (back in the black), Brooks Automation, BT Group, DirecTV, FIS, Fiserv, Garmin, Genpact, with revenue up but profit down; HCL Technologies, Insight Enterprises, Integrated Device Technology (back in the black), Intersil, Iron Mountain, L3 Communications (back in the black), NCR, PC Connection, Pitney Bowes (back in the black), Plantronics, Sony, Telesat, Verisk Analytics and Vishay Intertechnology.
* Mediocre quarterly results from AVG Technologies, Innolux (Taiwan), Nanya Technology, Orange, Samsung Electronics and Western Digital (back in the black).
* Mixed quarterly figures from Amdocs, with revenue up but profit down; AVX, with revenue up but profit down; CommVault Systems, with revenue up but profit down; Corning, with revenue up but profit down; FEI, with revenue up but profit down; Forrester Research, with revenue up but profit down; Harris, with revenue down but profit up; Harte-Hanks, with revenue up but profit down; Kyocera, with revenue up but profit down; Nice Systems, with revenue up but profit down; Vonage, with revenue up but profit down; and Yandex, with revenue up but profit down.
* Very poor quarterly figures from Compuware, NTELOS and Sprint (but back in the black).
* Quarterly losses from Alcatel-Lucent, Belden (although revenue well up), Ciber, Entegris, Epiq Systems, GoPro, Imation, Imperva, KPN, LinkedIn, MicroStrategy, Nintendo, PMC, Rovi, ServiceNow, Systemax, Tableau Software, Twitter and Web.com.
* The appointments of Chris Beard as CEO of Mozilla (was interim CEO); Rob Glaser as CEO of RealNetworks (was acting CEO); and R Srikrishna (ex-HCL Technologies) as CEO of Hexaware.

Worldwide:
* The worldwide smartphone market grew 23.1% in Q2 with 295.3 million shipments, according to IDC. Samsung and Apple remained in the top two slots, but Huawei took over the number three position from LG Electronics, which slipped to number five. Lenovo remained as the number four player.
* Xiaomi overtook Apple in Chinese smartphone sales in the first five months of 2014, according to Kantar Worldpanel ComTech. Samsung remained number one, with a 23% market share, followed by Xiaomi (21%) and Apple (16%).

* JSE All share index: Down 1.2%
* Nasdaq: Down 2.2%
* NYSE (Dow): Down 2.8%
* S&P 500: Down 2.7%
* FTSE100: Down 1.7%
* Top SA share movements: ConvergeNet Holdings (+8.2%), FoneWorx (+13.25%), Gijima (+20%), Huge Group (+11.5%), Jasco (-8.7%) and MICROmega Holdings (+11.7%)

International:
* The buyout of Comdata, a payments processing company, by FleetCor Technologies and some private equity companies, in a deal that could be worth more than $3 billion.

South Africa:
* The outcome of alleged talks between MTN and Tata Teleservices.

Fortune magazine recently published its latest Global 500 listing. From a technology perspective, the following is some further analysis of these rankings to that which was published in last week's column.

* Panasonic and Telefonica dropped out of the top 100.
* China Telecom was the highest regarding employment numbers, followed by Hitachi and HP.
* Vodafone was number one overall regarding biggest profits, followed by Apple (five), Samsung (nine) and Microsoft (15).
* Vodafone was number one overall regarding biggest increase in profit, followed by Verizon Communications (six) and LG Electronics (30).
* Softbank had the biggest increase in revenues (three overall), followed by Qualcomm (13) and Amazon (37).

The following were the largest movers:
* Amazon rose to 112, up from 149.
* BT Group dropped to 421, down from 394.
* Canon dropped to 292, down from 236.
* China Telecommunications rose to 154, up from 182.
* China Unicom rose to 210, up from 258.
* Flextronics rose to 459, up from 492.
* Fujitsu dropped to 222, down from 186.
* Google rose to 162, up from 189.
* Huawei rose to 285, up from 315.
* Ingram Micro rose to 256, up from 285.
* Lenovo rose to 286, up from 329.
* LG Display dropped to 481, down from 447.
* LG Electronics rose to 194, up from 225.
* NEC dropped to 405, down from 295.
* Nokia dropped to 392, down from 274.
* Quanta Computer dropped to 409, down from 321.
* Sharp dropped to 417, down from 383.
* Softbank rose to 135, up from 257.
* Telecom Italia dropped to 319, down from 281.