Japanese telecommunications group, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp (NTT), is buying SA IT group Dimension Data for £2,1bn (R24,4bn). The offer represents a R5bn premium to Didata’s value on Wednesday, before the offer was announced. Didata has already received commitments to support the deal from more than half its shareholders, including Didata directors, Venfin and Allan Gray.
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Communications minister Siphiwe Nyanda is planning to suspend department director-general Mamodupi Mohlala, according to a newspaper report. Business Day reports on Thursday that Nyanda may suspend Mohlala following “repeated disagreements over tenders she refused to sign”.
Reuben September’s decision to step down early as CEO of Telkom wasn’t unexpected. All eyes are now on the board, which must appoint his successor. Will it make the right choice? Or will the decision be political? It was probably inevitable that September didn’t stick around at Telkom until his con- tract ended in November. When the board elected not to renew his contract, the long- serving Telkom executive took it badly, say company insiders.
The surprise resignation of Telkom chief financial officer Peter Nelson could point to deeper problems at the telecommunications group, say analysts. Birgitta Cederstrom Nicholson, technology research head at Frost & Sullivan, says Nelson’s resignation and the early exit of the company’s CEO, Reuben September, is reason for concern.
Telkom’s chief financial officer, Peter Nelson, appears to have quit his job in part because of frustrations with the way the telecommunications group is being led by its board of directors. Telkom surprised the markets on Tuesday afternoon when it announced that Nelson had tendered his resignation just days after CEO Reuben September left the group.
Jean-Philippe Courtois, president of Microsoft International, was in SA last week to meet with the software company’s customers and to attend the soccer World Cup final in Johannesburg. TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod sat down with Courtois, who is responsible for all of Microsoft’s operations outside the US, for an exclusive media interview and asked him about life at the company after the departure of Bill Gates, cloud computing and the plans for its Bing search engine.
Australia’s government is trying to push the idea of a national broadband network, or NBN, through that country’s parliament. It wants Australian taxpayers to build a A$43bn fibre network that connects 90% of homes with broadband access of up to 100Mbit/s. To put that in context, in SA most households with Internet access are lucky to get an effective 1Mbit/s into the home.
The ministry of communications is confident the board of directors it has selected to manage Sentech will turn around the state-owned business and it will not interfere in the running of the company. This is despite a newspaper report at the weekend that acting CEO Beverly Ngwenya and chief financial officer Mohammed Cassim had resigned and were being charged for “gross negligence” as a result of alleged reckless spending.
A senior telecommunications industry executive on Tuesday warned against the dangers of a price war in international bandwidth capacity in…
Local mobile operators handled booming traffic volumes during the 2010 soccer World Cup. Vodacom enjoyed a 40% increase in SMS…