Huawei has been awarded an IT outsourcing contract by Etisalat Nigeria, according to local news reports.

Under the arrangement, Huawei will be responsible for the operational management of Etisalat Nigeria’s IT services across technical infrastructure, application management and user support.

However, the business planning, architecture and governance shall still be retained by Etisalat Nigeria.

About 75 per cent of the current IT staff will be transferred to Huawei with comparable terms of employment and compensation.

Warid Telecom and Bank Alfalah Limited have launched a mobile financial service (MFS) by the name of ‘Mobile Paisa’.

The service is initially being launched with support for payments of utility bills and a money transfer facility.

Monet is the technology provider who partnered with Fundamo – a mobile platform provider, to utilise its technology and offer branchless banking solutions to banks in Pakistan.

Monet financial cloud solution has the capability to host multiple banks completely secure and independent from each other.

BlackBerry co-founder, Mike Lazaridis has sold more of his shares in the company, raising US$26 million according to a stock market filing.

That was also the last time he had to report a share sale, as his stake in the company has now been reduced to below five per cent, which is the threshold for having to report such matters.

The sale of the shares also quashes the last vestige of rumours that he might lead a takeover attempt for the company.

According to the stock market filing, he sold around 3.5 million shares in two separate transactions last week.

Telkom South Africa has sold its pan-African business, iWayAfrica and Africa Online Mauritius through a private sale to Gondwana International Networks.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

iWayAfrica was formed as the result of the amalgamation of MWEB Africa and Africa Online in 2007 when MWEB Africa was purchased by Telkom.

Telkom has struggled to drive growth and profitability in the iWayAfrica business since it was acquired.

The iWayAfrica business operates in eight countries on the continent offering terrestrial wireless and VSAT services to business and residential users as well as via its channel partners in many other countries on the continent.

Huawei expects that revenues from its 4G sales will double in 2014 to at least US$4 billion, David Wang, president of Huawei Wireless Network, told reporters in Shanghai.

This year the company expects to have sold around US$2 billion worth of LTE based network equipment.

Huawei had signed 241 LTE deployment contracts in total up to the end of last month and says that it has deployments in nearly half of the 244 commercially launched LTE networks worldwide.

The company claims 110 deployments, compared to 100 from Ericsson, making it the largest winner of LTE contracts by contract volume. Financial volume was not compared.