Zain Saudi Arabia announced a 27 per cent increase in EBITDA to SAR348 million (US$93 million) quarter-on-quarter, with the telco’s EBITDA margin rising to 21 per cent in Q115, up from 17 per cent in the previous quarter.

Revenues were up nine per cent year-on-year to SAR 1.678 billion in Q1, and by six per cent quarter-on-quarter, reflecting a gross margin of 52 per cent.

Improving profitability reduced Zain Saudi’s net loss for the quarter by 19 per cent year-on-year to SAR 257 million, and 16 per cent quarter-on-quarter.

Mobile broadband customer numbers increased by 135 per cent during the quarter.

WhatsApp has hit 800 million monthly active users, according to a tweet from founder Jan Koum, indicating the company is maintaining its rapid growth trajectory.

Early this year Koum put the figure at 700 million, while the 600 million mark was passed in August 2014 – indicating that it is not seeing any slowdown of demand.

The Wall Street Journal noted that the messaging app is on track to hit one billion active users by the end of 2015 – putting it comfortably ahead of its closest rivals.

WhatsApp has had a busy year, adding the long-anticipated support for voice calling to its app, in order to broaden its portfolio to better rival players such as Skype, Viber, and Apple’s FaceTime.

The company has also introduced a web-based version of the service, although unlike other competing products, it is paired with a smartphone app.

Separately, it was reported that the company is working on Google Drive integration, to enable copies of messages and multimedia to be stored using the cloud storage service.

Etisalat Group reported that its aggregate subscriber base reached 173 million at the end of March 2015, representing net additions of 28 million subscribers for the previous 12 months.

Consolidated net profit for the quarter after Federal Royalty amounted to AED2.2 billion (US$602 million) reflecting a net profit margin of 17 per cent, up from eight per cent a year earlier.

Consolidated revenues for Q115 amounted to AED 12.9 billion, up 30 per cent year-on-year. Consolidated EBITDA for the first quarter totalled AED 6.6 billion, 33 per cent year-on-year, resulting in an EBITDA margin of 51 per cent.

Nokia is set to acquire Alcatel-Lucent in an all-share deal that values its smaller French rival at €15.6 billion (US$16.6 billion), building up its telecom equipment business to compete with market leader Ericsson.

With approximately 114,000 employees and sales of around €26 billion, the combined company will rank a strong second in mobile equipment, with global market share of 35 per cent, behind Ericsson at 40 per cent and ahead of Huawei’s 20 per cent.

The merged company will have stronger exposure to the important North American market, with major AT&T and Verizon contracts.

It will also fill gaps in its product portfolio with Alcatel-Lucent’s technology in optical transmission and Internet routers.

While Huawei does have a complete product line across both fixed and mobile, Ericsson does not and may have to react with deal-making or partnerships, executives said.

Nokia will give Alcatel-Lucent shareholders 0.55 shares in the combined company for each of their old shares, putting 33.5 percent of the entity in Alcatel-Lucent l shareholders’ hands if the tender offer is fully taken up.

The deal will be finalised in the first half of 2016 and is expected to result in €900 million of operating cost savings by the end of 2019, the companies said.

Nokia shares fell 1.5 per cent, adding to April 13’s 3.6 per cent fall, while Alcatel-Lucent fell 15.5 per cent, giving up most of the gains it made on April 13 when the talks were first acknowledged by the companies.

Nokia initially approached Alcatel-Lucent about buying only the wireless business but was rebuffed, leading to the broader deal, Alcatel-Lucent CEO Michel Combes told Reuters in an interview.

The deal carries significant risks, however. The track record of mergers in the sector – including the two that gave birth to Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent a decade ago – has been poor. Prior deals were plagued by the difficulty of cutting costs in an R&D intensive business, rivals stealing contracts while the companies were distracted by their integrations, and struggles over power within the married firms.

Nokia CEO Rajeev Suri sought to reassure.

“This is not a joint venture, so there will be no governance issues,” he said on a call with investors. “We will take a no politics, no nonsense approach to running the business, and have learned from past mistakes.”

Nokia pledged to keep France as “a vibrant centre of the combined company” and not to cut jobs beyond what Alcatel-Lucent had already planned, especially protecting research and development sites at Villarceaux and Lannion.

Nokia sold its once-dominant mobile handset business to Microsoft last year after struggling to compete with smartphones by Apple and Samsung. That deal left it with the network unit, a smaller map unit and a portfolio of technology patents.

Nokia said its growth profile would be improved by the deal and predicted a sales growth rate of about 3.5 per cent for 2014 to 2019. Nevertheless some investors remained concerned.

Separately, Nokia confirmed it was exploring the sale of its HERE mapping unit, which some analysts value at up to €6.9 billion. It also said further asset sales could be undertaken once the deal was completed.

Huawei confirmed a strong growth in profit for 2014 in its audited results, with Ken Hu, rotating CEO, stating that, “with heavy investment in innovations in areas such as cloud computing, big data, 5G, SDN and NFV, we believe we are well positioned to capture the tremendous business opportunities in this digital transformation era”.

The report, audited by KPMG, showed group net profit was CNY27.9 billion (US$4.5 billion), up 32.7 per cent, on revenue of CNY288.2 billion, up 20.6 per cent.

The company’s Carrier Business Group saw revenue increase by 16.4 per cent to CNY192.1 billion, with a “strong contribution from mobile broadband network rollouts around the world”.

It noted that as a result of TDD network construction, the operator networks unit saw a 22 per cent increase in revenue from its home market.

Huawei’s Consumer Business Group saw revenue increase by 32.6 per cent to CNY75.1 billion, “thanks to growing consumer demand for smartphones and particularly strong growth in emerging markets”.

It also said that during the year, it invested CNY40.8 billion in R&D, a “significant increase” of 29.4 per cent year-on-year. This represented 14.2 per cent of 2014 revenue.

In line with its policy of rotating CEOs, the company said that from April 1 to September 30, 2015, the role will be filled by Eric Xu.