WEDNESDAY, 10.00AM
The aggressive new Internet services company M-Web has bought out the service provider PiX Internet, giving it the country’s second largest dial-up customer base less than six months after its launch.
M-Web’s chief executive officer Antonie Roux says that the deal, for an undisclosed price, reflects a growing trend towards consolidation in the South African Internet industry, where smaller players are likely to be increasingly bought out by a handful of market leaders.
M-Web, the Internet services company from the Multichoice stable, will now have more than 20 000 dial-up subscribers, 10 000 of them from PiX. Only the rival Internet Africa has a larger dial-up subscriber base.
M-Web also claims to have South Africa’s largest daily readership traffic as of this month. Bruce Cohen, general manager of M-Web Interactive, says the combined monthly traffic of M-Web and its largest content provider, the Electronic Mail & Guardian, is 1,5-million page impressions.
The independently audited figure for the Electronic Mail & Guardian in October is 753 739 page impressions, more than all its rival news publishers added together.