THE WRAP: Sarin off, Dell up, Sony Ericsson down

It's been a surprising week. Arun Sarin announced he's leaving Vodafone in a classic quit-while-you're-ahead-exit. Dell exceeded Wall Street's hopes through stronger than expected overseas sales, while Sony Ericsson has fallen to fifth place in the handset stakes, overtaken by LG Electronics in the last quarter.

 

Meanwhile, Deutsche Telekom has become engulfed in a national scandal having revealed that it tracked board members' calls to find out who was leaking inside info to the press. Investigators  have been called and board members are threatening to sue. This will run and run.

 

So will the fight the US is picking with the EU over its tech product import tariffs, under the aegis of the World Trade Organisation.

 

And the shambles in the UK continued: Connecting for Health, the government's initiative to computerise all English patients' records, has dumped another primary contractor, Fujitsu.

 

Struggling Cable&Wireless secured a €126 million contract with the UK's largest retailer, Tesco, while Disney is trying out a new business model for its Disney Channel in Spain - offering it free-to-air.

 

There are fears that Nokia is about to drop the prices of some models, putting other manufacturers under serious pressure: its new factory in Romania has churned out 1 million devices in the three months since it started operations.

 

Loss-making German chipmaker Infineon Technologies has had a mixed week. It sacked its CEO, but then Samsung signed up Infineon as a supplier to reduce the Korean company's reliance on Qualcomm.

 

Asian companies in general seem to be having had a better time of it. A subsidiary of India's Reliance Communications has bought ailing British managed network services company Vanco and the main company in negotiations to acquire MTN after Bharti Airtel pullled out of talks.

 

Indian firm Videocon is talking to Motorola about acquiring its handset business and China's Huawei has set up a separate software company in a bid to become a major player in telco software outside its domestic market. It is particularly keen on breaking into Europe.

 

Finally, China unveiled its long promised restructure of its telecoms. It will merge the six state-owned carriers into three, but no date was given for the introduction of 3G. Apparently licences will be issued once the restructure is completed.