NEC Europe, a wholly owned subsidiary of NEC Corporation, has invested in XON, the sub-Sahara African ICT group, and the two organisations will have an integrated market approach that will combine their local expertise in the region to provide greater sales coverage in the sub-Sahara African market and accelerate regional growth for both companies in the telecoms, government, enterprise and energy sectors.

The two companies have explored joint sub-Sahara Africa business opportunities for the past 18 months and identified many areas of collaboration.

Naoki Iizuka, president and CEO, NEC Europe, says: "NEC has been operating in Africa for over 50 years through its representative offices and partners. Moreover, we enhanced our operation by setting up NEC Africa in 2011. This has enabled us to win many major contracts with government bodies, mobile and fixed operators and blue chip enterprises. With this strategic investment in XON, we'll be able to meet pent up demand for NEC's solutions by massively expanding our sub-Sahara African business consulting, systems integration and managed service support footprint as well as sales coverage."

"NEC Africa was created in 2011 and has almost doubled its revenues in the past three years," says Israel Skosana, chairman of XON. "Their approach to creating social value relating to energy, the environment, and food and water are common to all nations and we believe their solutions that address those key issues will help this relationship to flourish and help bring about social progress in our region."

"NEC is a powerful brand and the global business employs nearly 100,000 employees with ¥2,935.5 billion net sales in FY 2014. We are excited about the change that NEC's world class solutions, renowned for reliability in their advanced range of telecoms network infrastructure, public safety, renewable energy and system platform solutions could bring to Africa," says Carel Coetzee, CEO of XON. "Their portfolio is designed to enable new consumer and enterprise services, improve the overall network service experience and efficiencies, and helps to increase the average revenue per user for telecommunication and Internet service providers."

NEC and XON jointly carry a wider footprint across Africa to better support, service and maintain wherever their customers operate. The NEC products and solutions complement XON's current solutions and services and XON in turn is positioned to bring these world-class products and services to the African continent. The mutually exclusive structure for sub-Sahara Africa will join solutions to expand the scope available to customers relating to NEC and XON's current business lines:

• Networking and Security
• Infrastructure and Datacentre
• Information Management
• Cloud
• Retail
• Alternative Energy
• Consulting Services
• Public Safety
• Carrier Networks

NEC's Enterprise (Unified and ITPS) and display businesses in this region do not form part of the exclusivity agreements and NEC's existing channel business will continue with business as usual.

XON designs, builds and operates high performance networks for customers in the fixed and mobile network, public sector, retail and financial services industries and provides managed and outsourcing services. XON is a level 2 B-BBEE business. Solutions will now include NEC's microwave backhaul, indoor and outdoor 3G/LTE small cells and NetCracker Operational and Billing Support Systems (OSS/BSS) and the portfolio of NEC/NetCracker SDN/NFV solutions. This means that XON can now offer total end to end networking solutions from the access layer, transmission, IP Core routing and switching including SDN and NFV solutions, security right through to the management and billing platform provided by NetCracker.

NEC is a global Juniper Networks Service Provider Infrastructure Partner with Elite specialisation in Advanced Network Infrastructure. The addition of XON's deep IP networking and security skills set will strengthen NEC's Juniper expertise in EMEA, which includes Russia, and will form the foundation of NEC's regional Juniper and IP expertise. XON's IP networking and security portfolio complements NEC's carrier-grade transmission solutions and competencies, its last-mile access solutions and skills, and its management and billing platform. These technologies, solutions, and skills represent a significant growth market as Internet service providers, telecommunications service providers, and mobile networks seek next-generation network architectures capable of the scalability, flexibility, agility and operational efficiency on which to base demand for future customer services.

"Our vision at NEC is to create solutions for society. With our XON tie up we are much better positioned to bring these solutions to Africa. We expect our synergies and growth opportunities will see us develop a significant African presence through which we can better serve our customers," says Eugene Le Roux, MD and President of NEC Africa. "Benefits of the deal include the reinforcement of our South African B-BBEE credentials to level 3, and our customers in the region gaining use of XON's network operations centre (NOC) and security operations centre (SOC). There is also a wider regional synergy around sharing IP and security competencies across Europe, Middle East, Africa and Russia."

XON's NOC and SOC provide 24x7x365 monitoring and support that helps customers achieve minimum downtime, rapid incident resolution, increased end-user and customer satisfaction, and increased job satisfaction of IT support and operations employees. The NOC and SOC solutions help to accelerate network, system, application and security failure resolution, provide detailed management information to benchmark network, system and security performance, and perform root cause analysis for ongoing issues.

About XON Holdings
XON established in 1996, designs, builds, operates, and manages information and communication technology (ICT) solutions created specifically for customers. We are a level 2 B-BBEE business that embraces social responsibility and upliftment. For more information, visit http://www.xon.co.za

About the Kapela Group
The Kapela Group is a majority black owned business. It is made up of a team of professionally qualified people with extensive experience, who actively get involved in their investees to add value. As a value investor, Kapela aims to remain invested over a long period in our investees and contribute the following: more than 80 years of executive management experience; experience in corporate leadership; a strong network of relationships in both the private and public sectors; capital and broad-based empowerment rating. http://kapelainvestments.co.za/

About NEC Europe
NEC Europe, registered in the UK is a subsidiary of NEC Corporation, headquartered in Tokyo, a leader in the integration of IT network technologies that benefit businesses and people around the world. NEC Europe is building upon its heritage and reputation for innovation and quality by providing its expertise, solutions and services to a broad range of customers, from telecom operators to enterprises and the public sector. For additional information, please visit the NEC Europe home page at: http://uk.nec.com and NEC Corporation home page at: http://www.nec.com/

Media enquiries:
Carel Coetzee, XON
Contact details: 011 237 4500, carel@xon.co.za

Media enquiries:
Eugene le Roux, NEC Africa
Contact details: 011 656 3419, eugene.leroux@emea.nec.com