Who's buying Storm now?!?

Amazing how acquisition rumours ricochet around an industry like pings  on the Net!  I'm almost able to count on the fingers of one hand the entities that have NOT recently been rumoured to be buying Storm.  A MyADSL article on Vodacom's foray into the ISP market, mentioned as an aside almost, that they'd been in discussions with Storm.  The phrasing was interesting:

"Vodacom confirmed that they had a few discussions with large ISP players like Internet Solutions and Storm, but added that they have not progressed much further than that.  According to Vodacom’s COO Pieter Uys, Internet Solutions is not for sale and the discussions with Storm did not lead anywhere."

All of a sudden, people are under the impression Storm have got a "For Sale" sign hanging on the door and have ads out the classifieds column!  The funniest was an incident yesterday.  TimWG, one of our Joint-CEO's, wryly commented before the Marketing meeting "Oh, I believe that XYZ (another significant player in the ISP industry) have bought us."  Not an hour later I get a call from an ex-colleague (we'll call him Ted) from XYZ to say "Can you confirm a rumour for me?  Are Vodacom buying you?"  To which of course my reply was "No, but I believe you are!"  Honestly!?

It would be irresponsible of any management team of any company not to consider and explore strategic alliances, partnerships, JV's, acquisitions even.  It would be even more irresponsible not to entertain approaches by entities with interesting offers to discuss.  But 9 times out of 10, discussions of this nature are not fruitful.  They sure seem to get to the "have your heard...?" stage reasonably often.

It is a time where South African ICT companies are waking up to the changes in the regulatory environment, in technology, and the way that margins on basic services are dropping.  It is natural for some mergers & acquisitions to be forming.  Telkom are wanting to buy BCX.  It's hard to keep track of who DataPro have acquired or are about to buy (I trust shareholders are going to see some organic growth there at some stage... mmm?).  Neotel are buying Transtel (good move that, I believe - Transtel have a very good network, quite apart from that appropriated by the DPE, but they lack sales and marketing clout). 

So, do you have any juicy rumours of who is meant to be buying Storm next? 

Drop me a mail. ;)

Comments

[danette]

Sorry. No rumours here. Just couldn't help but hope that "Pieter Uys" you mentioned up there doesn't have any relation to Pieter Dirk Uys. :P