American Tower buys Eaton Towers for $1.85bn

By Paul Booth

Johannesburg, 03 Jun 2019

The Global Payments/TSS deal and the American Tower/Eaton Towers deal dominated the international ICT market last week.

At home, we saw the reappointments at the Department of Communications.

Key local news

Mixed interim numbers from Reunert, with revenue up 9.2% but profit down 15.8%.
Good year-end numbers from Cartrack Holdings, with revenue up 27.8% and profit up 16.3%; and ISA, with revenue up 10.9% and profit up 41.5%
Mixed year-end figures from Telkom SA, with revenue up 5.3% but profit down 5.6%.
A positive trading update from the Huge Group.
Crossfin Technology, an African fintech holding company, and Apis Growth Fund, a private equity fund managed by Apis Partners, have acquired Sureswipe, a card payment solutions firm.
Naspers will list its consumer Internet business on Amsterdam’s Euronext exchange on 17 July, subject to market conditions.
The departments of higher education and science and technology will be merged into one, headed by former transport minister, Blade Nzimande, with Buti Manamela as his deputy.
The appointment of Sipho Mngqibisa as acting CEO of USAASA.
The reappointments of Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams as minister of the Department of Communications, and Pinky Kekana as deputy minister in that portfolio.
The resignation of Denzil Perreira, chairman of ISA.
The departure of Lumko Mtimde, CEO of USAASA.

Key African news

State-owned Cameroon Telecommunications (Camtel) is poised to generate more revenue by selling shares to public and private investors after officially opening up its capital.
The Moroccan government will sell up to an 8% stake in Maroc Telecom, Morocco's largest telecoms operator.
The appointment of Shashank Sharma as Lenovo’s executive director and GM for the Middle East, Turkey and Africa region.

Key international news

American Tower acquired Eaton Towers, which owns and operates approximately 5 500 communications sites across five African markets, in a deal worth $1.85 billion.
Apple bought Tueo Health, a digital health solutions start-up.
FireEye purchased Verodin, a security instrumentation company, for $250 million.
Foursquare acquired Placed, a location-data specialist.
Global Payments bought its peer Total System Services for $21.5 billion.
Insight Partners purchased Recorded Future, a cyber security company.
Intuit acquired Origami Logic, a developer of technology to analyse and gain insights from multiple data sets.
LinkedIn bought Drawbridge, a digital identity management company.
NetApp purchased Israeli data security developer Cognigo.
NXP Semiconductors acquired Marvell Technology Group's wireless connectivity business for $1.76 billion.
Palo Alto Networks bought Israeli cyber security firm Twistlock and PureSec’s expertise in serverless security to the Prisma cloud security suite.
Ultrahaptics, a gesture tracking firm, purchased Leap Motion, its US-based rival, for $30 million.
Upland Software acquired Kapost, a leading content operations platform provider for sales and marketing, in a deal worth $50 million.
Investment firms WaveDivision Capital and Searchlight Capital Partners bought Frontier Communications’ assets in some US states for $1.35 billion.
United Group, a Balkan telecoms and media company, purchased Tele2 Croatia, a Croatian telecoms operator, for €220 million.
Innolux, a flat panel maker, has won a patent lawsuit against China-based rival Chongqing HKC Optoelectronics Technology, citing a ruling released by an intermediate people's court in China.
Germany’s anti-trust office is extending its review of a mainframe computing deal between T-Systems, the IT services arm of Deutsche Telekom, and IBM.
Ireland’s Supreme Court has dismissed a bid by Facebook to block a landmark privacy case regarding the transfer of EU users’ data to the US being referred to Europe’s top court.

The US Justice Department is preparing an investigation of Alphabet's Google.

Japan’s government said hi-tech industries will be added to a list of businesses for which foreign ownership of Japanese firms is restricted. It made no mention of specific countries or companies that will be impacted by applying existing foreign ownership restrictions to the IT and telecoms industries.
Sword & Shield, Terra Verde and TruShield have come together under the ownership of growth equity firm Sunstone Partners to form Avertium, a 150-person managed security service provider that will be led Jeff Schmidt, who most recently served as president and CEO of Authomate, a secure access provider.
The US Justice Department is preparing an investigation of Alphabet's Google to determine whether the tech giant broke anti-trust laws in operating its sprawling online businesses.
A US judge ordered Facebook to give shareholders e-mails and other records concerning how the social media company handles data privacy, after data for 87 million users was accessed by British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.
Semiconductor Manufacturing International has announced plans to delist its American depositary shares from the NYSE.
Excellent quarterly results from Jianpu Technology (back in the black).
Excellent year-end figures from Uros (Finland).
Very good quarterly figures from Veeva Systems and YY.
Good quarterly numbers from SilverSun Technologies.
Satisfactory quarterly results from Booz Allen Hamilton, Dell Technology (back in the black), Descartes Systems Group, Elbit Systems, Keysight Technologies, Semtech and Verint Systems (back in the black).
Mixed quarterly figures from Momo and VMware, with revenue up but net income down; and from Bezeq Telecom and Tech Data, with revenue down but net income up.
Very poor quarterly figures from Partner Communications.
Quarterly losses from Anaplan, Bharti Airtel, Cellcom Israel, Daktronics, iClick Interactive Asia, Marvell Technology Group, Nutanix, Okta, Palo Alto Networks, QAD, Westell Technologies, Workday, Yext, Zscaler and Zuora.
A full-year loss from Altitude Group.
The appointments of Bimal Dayal as CEO of the new tower company to be formed by the merger of Indus Towers and Bharti Infratel; Raghu Rau as vice-chairman of TiVo (was interim CEO); Dave Shull as CEO of TiVo; and Jeff Tarr as CEO of Solera Holdings, a global leader in risk and asset management data and SaaS solutions for the automotive and insurance industries.
A planned IPO this month in London from Airtel Africa.
A good IPO on London’s AIM market by essensys, a workplace software management company.

Research results and predictions

South Africa:

Smartphone unit sales in SA declined by about 7% year-on-year in Q119, while the value of the smartphone market climbed nearly 3% to around R8.6 billion, as shoppers splashed out on higher-end models with larger screen sizes, according to GfK South Africa’s Weekly Monitor.

EMEA/Africa:

Shipments of EMEA traditional PCs (a combination of desktops, notebooks and workstations) will total 71.3 million in 2019, a 0.4% year-on-year (YOY) decline, according to IDC.
Artificial intelligence spending in the MEA region is poised to reach $290 million this year, rising to $530 million in 2022, according to IDC. It expects investment in AI across the region to grow 42.5% year-on-year in 2019 and continue increasing at a CAGR of 22.2% over the 2019-2022 period.
The overall tablet market in EMEA declined 10.9% year-on-year, shipping 9.7 million units in Q119, according to IDC.

Worldwide:

Global sales of smartphones to end-users declined 2.7% in the first quarter of 2019, totalling 373 million units, according to Gartner.
Global shipments of wearable devices reached 49.6 million units during 1Q19, up 55.2% from the previous year, according to IDC. While wrist-worn wearables accounted for most of the market, with a 63.2% share, ear-worn devices experienced the fastest growth (135.1% year-over-year) and accounted for 34.6% of all wearables shipped.
Global smartphone shipments will face another challenging year in 2019, with volumes forecast to decline 1.9% from 2018, according to IDC.
The combined consumer and enterprise worldwide wireless local area network market segments increased 6.9% year-over-year in 1Q19, finishing at $2.4 billion, according to IDC.
The worldwide Ethernet switch market (layer 2/3) recorded $6.8 billion in revenue in 1Q19, an increase of 7.8% year-over-year, according to IDC. Meanwhile, the worldwide total enterprise and service provider router market revenue grew 8.2% year-over-year in 1Q19 to $3.6 billion.

Stock market changes

JSE All share index: Up 2.3%
FTSE100: Down 1.6%
DAX: Down 2.4%
NYSE (Dow): Down 3%
S&P 500: Down 2.6%
Nasdaq: Down 2.4%
Nikkei225: Down 2.4%
Hang Seng: Down 1.7%
Shanghai: Up 1.6%

Look out for

International:

The potential buyers for prepaid wireless brand Boost Mobile in an upcoming sale valuing the offshoot of T-Mobile US and Sprint at up to $3 billion.