Altice USA makes history

The Altice IPO in the US was the highlight of the international ICT market last week.

At home, excellent year-end figures from Ansys, and a handful of small acquisitions, were the main local stories.

* Excellent year-end figures from Ansys, with revenue up 70% and profit up 239%.
* Satisfactory year-end figures from Naspers, with revenue up 2.8% and profit up 180.5%.
* Very good Q3 numbers from Telemasters, with revenue up 30.3% and profit up 3115.9%.
* Datatec's Logicalis Group acquired a majority stake in Packet Systems Indonesia, an ICT systems integrator and service company that will be integrated with Logicalis Metrodata Indonesia, the existing Indonesian operation of Logicalis.
* Rectron bought a majority stake in ERP software development company, Palladium, a South African company led by 25-year ERP veteran Stephen Corrigan.
* Metrofile purchased Tidy Files (SA), a provider of end-to-end document management and storage solutions in Southern Africa, in a deal worth R75 million.
* Neotel's enterprise operation has officially been rebranded to Liquid Telecom South Africa.
* CQS Technology Holdings has changed its name to CaseWare Africa, a division of Adapt IT, which recently purchased the business.
* A renewed JSE cautionary by Blue Label Telecoms.
* The appointment of Ross Moody as MD of Rainmaker Solutions SA.

* The Banks, led by Access Bank and other local and foreign banks, have now taken over the management of Etisalat Nigeria.
* The appointment of Morne Bekker as South African country manager and district manager for the SADC region at NetApp.

Toshiba has left the Nikkei 225 for the first time since the index was launched in 1950.

* Adobe acquired all of the SkyBox technology from Mettle, a global developer of 360-degree virtual reality software.
* CVC Capital Partners, Europe's biggest private equity group, bought a large controlling stake in QA, the IT training company. The deal was worth £700 million.
* IPG Photonics purchased Laser Technologies, a producer of high-precision laser-based systems that will accelerate IPG's ability to deliver best-in-class standardised and turnkey systems solutions to the medical device industry and other key end-user markets. The deal was worth $40 million.
* GTT Communications acquired Perseus, a provider of high-speed network connectivity serving many of the world's top financial and e-commerce companies.
* II-VI bought Integrated Photonics, which was founded in 2000 as a spin-out of the magneto-optic materials group of AT&T Bell Labs. It is a leader in engineered magneto-optic materials that enable high-performance directional components such as optical isolators for the optical communications market.
* Perficient purchased Clarity Consulting, a consultancy with deep expertise in custom development, cloud implementations and digital experience design on Microsoft platforms and devices.
* Snap acquired Zenly, a French map start-up, for $200 million.
* ARM Holdings (now owned by SoftBank) led a £17 million investment in Blu Wireless, whose technology is seen as crucial to the next generation of mobile networks.
* JD.com made a $397 million investment in Farfetch, a London-based online fashion retailer.
* Singaporean-founded and US-based gaming hardware company Razer made a 19.9% investment of a minority stake in Malaysia's e-payments platform MOL Global.
* SoftBank made a $100 million investment in Cybereason, a cyber security start-up.
* Altaba (a remnant of Yahoo) has started trading on the Nasdaq.
* Gartner has unveiled the top global 100 vendors in IT in 2016, based on their revenue across IT (excluding communication services) and component market segments. The top five vendors, according to Gartner, are: Apple ($218.1 billion), Samsung ($139.1 billion), Google ($90.1 billion), Microsoft ($85.7 billion) and IBM ($77.8 billion).
* Imagination Technologies has put itself up for sale, as its battles with Apple over chip designs.
* Orange has cut its stake in BT group to 1.33% from 4%.
* Toshiba has chosen a consortium of Japanese government investors and Bain Capital as the preferred bidders for its chip business, aiming to seal a deal worth $18 billion.
* Toshiba has left the Nikkei 225 for the first time since the index was launched in 1950.
* Very good quarterly figures from Adobe.
* Good quarterly numbers from Red Hat and Synnex.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from Methode Electronics and Oracle.
* Mixed quarterly figures from Accenture, with revenue up but profit down; American Software, with revenue down but profit up; and BlackBerry, with revenue down but back in the black.
* Quarterly losses from Renren and Veritone.
* The appointments of Andrew Anagnost as CEO of Autodesk; Jason Chen as chairman of Acer; Tom Cho as chairman of Inventec; Edward Kennedy as CEO and president of CENX, a Canadian telecommunications company; Thomas Lausten as CEO of Mobotix; Jude McColgan as CEO of Localytics; Simon Williams as CEO of NTT Data UK; and Maurice Wu as president of Inventec.
* The resignation of Travis Kalanick, CEO of Uber.
* A planned IPO in Warsaw from Play, Poland's second-largest mobile phone company, in what is expected to be Europe's largest telecoms IPO in five years.
* An IPO filing in the US from Genealogy Web site Ancestry.com.
* An IPO filing for the NYSE from Vencore, a government IT services company.
* A good IPO on the NYSE by Altice USA, in what was the second largest IPO this year and the largest telecommunications IPO for 20 years.

EMEA/Africa:
* Unit shipments of printer hardware to EMEA have stabilised in Q117, showing an increase of 1% year-on-year compared to a fall of 8% in Q116, a change that has been driven by multifunction devices, according to Context.
* Shipments of wearables were up 30.2% year-on-year in the MEA region, according to IDC.
* A massive 2.6 billion new mobile broadband subscribers will be added through 2022, an average of more than a million each day, according to the Ericsson Mobility Report. Africa added nine million new mobile subscriptions in Q117, reaching a total of 985 million.

Worldwide:
* Dedicated AR and VR headsets collectively are expected to grow at a very strong pace, from just under 10 million units in 2016 to just shy of 100 million units in 2021, with a five-year CAGR of 57.7%, according to IDC.
* 3D printer shipments increased 29% in 2016, while revenue grew by more than 18% year-on-year in 2016, according to IDC.
* Vendors will ship a total of 125.5 million wearable devices this year, marking a 20.4% increase from the 104.3 million units shipped in 2016, according to IDC. From there, the wearables market will nearly double, before reaching a total of 240.1 million units shipped in 2021, resulting in a five-year CAGR of 18.2%.
* Worldwide converged systems market revenue increased 4.6% year-on-year to $2.67 billion during 1Q17, according to IDC. The market consumed 1.48-exabytes of new storage capacity during the quarter, which was up only 7.1% compared to the same period a year ago.

* JSE All share index: Up 1.3%
* FTSE100: Down 0.5%
* DAX: Down 0.2%
* NYSE (Dow): Up 0.1%
* S&P 500: Up 0.2%
* Nasdaq: Up 1.8%
* Nikkei225: Up 0.9%
* Hang Seng: Up 0.2%
* Shanghai: Up 1.1%

International:
* BMC Software merging with CA Technologies.
* Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, being appointed the new CEO of Uber.
* Further developments regarding Toshiba's chip business.

South Africa:
* Further news regarding the Blue Label/Cell C situation.

The Wall Street Journal has published its inaugural list of technology companies to watch. The list identifies 25 emerging companies across dynamic sectors of technology, including: consumer hardware, cyber security, healthcare, financial technology, business services, e-commerce, education and social media. Companies included in the list are less than six years old and have a valuation estimated between $50 million and $500 million.

The Wall Street Journal performed an extensive data analysis and surveyed technology watchers to examine companies based on their founders' experience, the investments they have attracted, the prior success of their investors, the growth of their workforce, and the buzz they are generating.

The Wall Street Journal Tech Companies to watch, listed in order, are:
1. Hollar
2. Collective Health
3. August Home
4. Clever
5. Eero
6. Jibo
7. Ring
8. Darktrace
9. Tile
10. Lemonade
11. Illusive Networks
12. Doctor on Demand
13. AltSchool
14. Cybereason
15. Andela
16. Color Genomics
17. Earnest
18. Zola
19. Flexport
20. Branch Metrics
21. Via Transportation
22. Acorns Grow
23. Life on Air
24. Argus Cyber Security
25. Babylon Healthcare Services