Vodafone and Verizon have pulled the $80 billion float of joint venture Verizon Wireless for the old "market volatility" reason. The money was needed to capture one of the American mobile telephone licences, up for grabs soon. A postponement of the float until next year means the two0 companies will have to borrow the $5 billion they expected to raise.

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Reuters is planning to float its electronic dealing platform Instinet in the first half on next year. The float would be worth around £3 billion and would see Reuters retain the majority share. The money would go into further expansion. Instinet offers banks and investors equity trading. Its sales leapt by half in the first six months of this year while operating profit went up 5 per cent to £84 million.

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Vivendi's 22.7 per cent stake in BSkyB - which has to be sold within two years for it to acquire Seagram - may be sold to Sky Global Networks, part of The News Corporation, which already owns 37.5 per cent of BSkyB. BSkyB may then be pulled into Sky Global Networks with other satellite interests to make a floatable company.

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nCipher plc - which develops Internet security products for e-commerce and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) applications - has announced pricing details of its offer of ordinary shares to institutions and employees. The share price has been set at 275p, giving the company a market cap of some £333 million. If all goes to plan nCipher plans to raise £85.4 million.

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SurfControl plc - which provides net filtering software - reported a $3.1m loss for Q1 ended 31 August against revenues of $6.7 million. ®

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