Boost for African digital payments

Paul Booth

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The Xerox change of heart re Fujifilm and the news re Toshiba's chip unit sale dominated the international ICT market last week, while at home it was very quiet.

* Excellent interim numbers from Ayo Technology Solutions, with revenue up 49.1% and profit up 185.3%.
* Satisfactory year-end figures from Datatec, with revenue up 1.6% and profit up 390.7%; Vodacom, with revenue up 6.3% and profit up 18.6%; and YeboYethu, with revenue up 3.2% and profit up 72.1%.
* Negative trading updates from ISA and Telkom SA.
* The $20.2 million acquisition by Datatec's Logicalis Group of Coasin Chile SA, a Chilean ICT services and solutions provider, which also has operations in Peru.
* Guided learning provider FutureLearn, a subsidiary of financial services group PSG, has acquired South African adult education and training specialist Media Work.
* Cape Town-based IOT start-up Sensor Networks has secured R13 million series B funding from 4Di Capital; Sanari Capital, which led the round; and the Asia ESD Fund, managed by Edge Growth.
* A renewed JSE cautionary by Huge Group.

* The $47.5 million investment by private investment firm TPG for an unspecified stake in Kenyan digital payments firm Cellulant, which operates in 11 African markets.
* Zambia's fourth mobile phone operator Uzi Zambia will begin operations before year-end.

* The acquisition by 8x8 of MarianaIQ, a high-growth Silicon Valley start-up, as part of the strategic investments it has been making in artificial intelligence and machine learning.
* Boxlight bought UK-based Cohuborate, a developer of touch display technology for the education, business and government markets.
* CGI of Facilit'e Informatique purchased an IT consulting services firm.
* The acquisition by Google of Cask Data, a solution developer for big data analytics based on Hadoop.
* HPE purchased Plexxi, a provider of software-defined data fabric networking technology.
* Oracle bought DataScience.com, whose platform centralises data science tools, projects and infrastructure in a fully-governed workspace.
* The $2.2 billion acquisition by PayPal of Swedish rival iZettle.
* Sopra Steria bought it-economics, a German consulting firm specialising in digital transformation, agile development, cloud services and the management of complex large-scale enterprise IT projects.
* The acquisition by Worldline, a French payments company, of the payments unit of Swiss stock exchange operator SIX Group, in the latest example of consolidation within the sector.
* China regulators have approved the $18 billion sale of Toshiba's chip unit to a consortium led by US private equity firm Bain Capital, marking the end to a year-long saga surrounding its most prized asset, in a deal that should now be completed by June.
* Kaspersky Lab plans to open a data centre in Switzerland by the end of next year to help address Western government concerns that Russia exploits its anti-virus software to spy on customers.
* Cambridge Analytica, the firm at the centre of the Facebook privacy row, has filed for voluntary Chapter 7 bankruptcy in a New York court.

Swiftly started selling enterprise software to transit systems in the last quarter of 2016 and in one year expanded to 45 cities, including Boston and Chicago.

* Xerox will back out of its merger deal with Fujifilm Holdings.
* Excellent quarterly results from Tencent Holdings.
* Very good quarterly figures from Applied Materials.
* Good quarterly numbers from Genius Electronic, Lie-On Semiconductor and Synnex Technology.
* Good year-end numbers from IIJ.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from Acxiom (back in the black), Agilent, Bouygues Telecom, Cisco, Iliad, LightPath Technologies and Magic Software.
* Mediocre quarterly results from Foxconn, HannStar Display, Quanta Computer, Take-Two Interactive and Telecom Italia.
* Mixed quarterly figures from Asustek, NetEase, Switch and Unimicron, with revenue up but net income down; and Career Technology (but back in the black), PCL and Rovio, with revenue down but net income up.
* Quarterly losses from ALi, Boxlight, CPT, Intellicheck, Mimecast, ParkerVision, Sea Limited, SITO Mobile, Veon, voxeljet AG, VOXX International and WidePoint.
* A full-year loss from Sophos.
* The appointments of Keith Cozza as chairman of Xerox; Maxime Lombardini as chairman of Iliad (was CEO); Nick Read as CEO of Vodafone; Thomas Reynaud as CEO of Iliad; and John Visentin as CEO of Xerox.
* The resignation of Vittorio Colao, CEO of Vodafone.
* The departure of Jeff Jacobson, CEO of Xerox.
* A satisfactory IPO on the London Stock Exchange by Avast, the Czech-based cyber security firm.

Worldwide:
* According to Berg Insight, global shipments of NB-IOT devices will grow at a CAGR of 41.8% from 106.9 million units in 2018 to reach 613.2 million units in 2023.
* According to IDC, worldwide spending on telecommunications services and pay-TV services reached $1 662 billion in 2017, an increase of 1.4% year-over-year. It believes the growth rate will accelerate to 1.6% in 2018, bringing worldwide spending on telecom and pay TV services to $1 689 billion. The market is forecast to continue its growth until the end of the five-year forecast period (2018-2022), growing at a CAGR of 1.1%.
* According to IDC, worldwide revenues for IT services and business services totalled $502 billion in 2H17, an increase of 3.6% year-over-year.

* JSE All share index: Down 1.1%
* FTSE100: Up 0.7%
* DAX: Up 0.6%
* NYSE (Dow): Down 0.5%
* S&P 500: Down 0.5%
* Nasdaq: Down 0.7%
* Nikkei225: Up 0.8%
* Hang Seng: Down 0.2%
* Shanghai: Up 0.9%

International:
* Further news on ZTE and the US's recent announcement on a possible change of heart of its current banning stance.

South Africa:
* Vodacom buying 49% of fibre-to-the-home provider Vumatel, with Dark Fibre Africa, in a deal possibly facilitated through its largest shareholder, Remgro, acquiring the remaining 51% of the company.

Inc magazine has published its list of the 30 Most Inspiring Young Entrepreneurs of 2018.

Included in the list are:

* Suhail Doshi, CEO of Mixpanel, a fast-growing start-up in the business of revealing all sorts of information about consumer behaviour. The San Francisco company provides analytics tools for mobile and Web apps, working behind the scenes to help clients track what their users are doing inside their software products.
* Jobert Abma and Michiel Prins, two of the founders of HackerOne. At school they hacked into the high school TV station and in college they told an education software company that its platform leaked grades and personal data. In 2012, Alex Rice, then Facebook's head of product security, challenged them to find a vulnerability. They did, scored a contract with Facebook, and started hacking into Twitter, Spotify and Uber to win work from them, too. They, with two others, started HackerOne in 2012, to run "bug bounty" programmes, which reward hackers for finding security flaws for Starbucks, GM, Uber the US Department of Defence, and about 1 000 other organisations.
* Alexander Harmsen and James Howard, co-founders of Iris Automation, a firm that makes software that allows autonomous drones to "see" where they're flying and avoid obstacles.
* Jonny Simkin, who sold his edtech company and moved to San Francisco in 2012 where he ditched his car and switched to public transit. Though he was happy with the switch, Simkin saw room for improvement and co-founded a mobile app, Swyft, to provide his fellow riders with better transit schedules backed by GPS data and crowd-sourced reporting. Simkin and his co-founders eventually realised their data could also be used by transit agencies directly, and Swyft became Swiftly. Swiftly Transitime provides transit data to customer-facing apps (in the cities where it is deployed, Swiftly provides the data for Google Maps), while Swiftly Insights analyses the data for transit agencies, using algorithms to identify where delays indicate significant problems or failures. Swiftly started selling enterprise software to transit systems in the last quarter of 2016 and in one year expanded to 45 cities, including Boston and Chicago. Swiftly's software can be adapted to work with all existing GPS hardware aboard a city's buses and trains, allowing the software to get up and running very quickly. This ability to scale fast has Simkin confident Swiftly will operate in thousands of cities in the next five years.