THE WRAP: Vodafone's profits halve, C&W disappoints, Verizon delays

The world’s biggest mobile operator by revenue, Vodafone, halved its annual profit and CEO Vittorio Colao predicted flat growth in 2009. Its Spanish and Turkish properties continue to prove problematic.

This week saw Vodafone finally gain control of South Africa’s Vodacom, which floated on the Johannesburg stock market on Monday, having fought off a union-backed bid to prevent it buying the controlling share.

C&W failed to please the market when it announced its annual results. Net debt exceeded analysts’ expectations, mainly due to the acquisition of Thus, while pre-tax profits were less than expected, falling by 13% since last year to £233 million.

France’s SRF (part of Vivendi) saw a 31.5% rise in Q1 revenues.

David Thodey took over Telstra’s top job as Sol Trujillo slipped away to the US six weeks early.

The Indian government reportedly allowed Huawei to win a share of a $6 billion GSM upgrade contract, but told BSNL to inspect the gear closely for backdoors. For security reasons, Huawei won’t be allowed to supply equipment in India’s border states.

Huawei knocked Alcatel-Lucent off the top spot in optical networking in  Q1 and is looking that it might make its position in that sector permanent.

Verizon announced it would delay LTE rollout until late 2010.

Storage company NetApp acquired data backup firm Data Domain for $1.5 billion in cash and stock. Sun announced  a Java app store. Cisco unveiled its smart grid plans.

BT and 3 in the UK launched a campaign against mobile termination rates as Ofcom moves to rule on the matter for 2011-2015.

France Telecom and Orascom continue to wrangle over ownership of Egyptian operator ECMS, a row that has been going on since 2001.

Larry Page, co-founder of Google said that the world would be a less healthy piace if the European Commission oblige it to wipe data on users’ search behaviour after six months. He claimed the data could help predict pandemics, such as swine flu.

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