Chinese firm pays big bucks for Ingram Micro

The buyout of Ingram Micro and another acquisition by IBM in the health sector were the main stories of the international ICT market last week.

At home, the negative trading update from MTN dominated the local ICT media space.

* Satisfactory interim numbers from Silverbridge Holdings, with revenue up 3.4% and profit up 38.1%.
* A positive trading update from Mustek.
* A negative trading update from MTN and therefore MTN Zakhele.
* Berlin-based JustWatch has launched in SA, and already has 10 000 local users. JustWatch is a streaming search engine that helps users find where movies and TV shows are available online to watch legally.

Berlin-based JustWatch has launched in SA.

* Amazon acquired Indian payments company Emvantage, in a move designed to bolster payment services in India.
* China's Tianjin Tianhai Investment Company bought Ingram Micro for $6 billion; it will become part of the HNA Group.
* IBM purchased Truven Health Analytics, a provider of healthcare data and analytics, for $2.6 billion.
* Millicom acquired Paraguayan cable operator TV Cable Paran'a.
* Alibaba made a 5.6% investment in Groupon.
* The Marvell Technology Group will pay Carnegie Mellon University $750 million to settle a nearly seven-year-old lawsuit accusing it of infringing two hard disk drive patents held by the Pittsburgh school.
* Qualcomm has reached a new patent-licensing deal with Lenovo Group.
* VimpelCom has admitted to paying more than $114 million in bribes to an Uzbekistan official and agreed to pay more than $795 million in civil and criminal penalties to US and Dutch authorities.
* Liberty Global and Vodafone Group today announced an agreement to merge their operating businesses in the Netherlands to form a 50:50 joint venture.
* Powa Technologies, a UK-based mobile commerce company, has gone into liquidation.
* Excellent quarterly results from Silver Spring Networks.
* Very good quarterly figures from Arista Networks and InterDigital.
* Good quarterly numbers from EPAM Systems and Sapiens.
* Good year-end numbers from Capgemini.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from Nvidia, T-Mobile US, Turkcell and Virgin Media.
* Satisfactory half-year figures from Telstra.
* Mediocre quarterly results from Analog Devices, Applied Materials, Arris, Asustek, Garmin, NetApp, SMIC, Syntel, Telecom Italia and Vasco Data Security.
* Mixed quarterly figures from Brocade Communications Systems, with revenue down but profit up; Cincinnati Bell, with revenue down but back in the black; Equinix, with revenue up but profit down; Liberty Global, with revenue down but profit up; Magic Software, with revenue up but profit down; Rackspace, with revenue up but profit down; Sonus Networks, with revenue down but back in the black; Synopsys, with revenue up but profit down; Trend Micro, with revenue up but profit down; VimpelCom, with revenue down but back in the black; and Yandex, with revenue up but profit down.
* Mixed restated year-end figures from Orange, with revenue down (just), but profit up.
* Very poor quarterly figures from Diodes.
* Quarterly losses from Ciber, CommScope, Dish Networks, EarthLink, Gilat Satellite, GoDaddy, Lattice Semiconductor, MDC Partners and Novatel Wireless.
* The appointment of Sergei Emdin as CEO of Tele2 Russia.

South Africa:
* South Africans are expected to spend more than R37 billion online in 2016, as a high penetration of smartphones and cross-border shopping drive online spending, according to digital payments business PayPal. Mobile phones and tablets are expected to account for nearly R12 billion of that, a 70% growth on 2015. By 2017, mobile payments are expected to contribute more than R19 billion to online spend of R46 billion.

EMEA/Africa:
* IT spending by banking and securities firms in MENA will be approximately $12.5 billion in 2016, a 2.4% increase over 2015, according to Gartner. This forecast includes spending on internal IT services (including personnel), IT services, software, data centre technologies, devices and telecoms services.
* In EMEA, 38.1% of IT spending came from technology buyers outside of IT, according to IDC.

Worldwide:
* According to CCS Insight, 411 million smart wearable devices, worth a staggering $34 billion, will be sold in 2020.
* Global sales of smartphones to end-users totalled 403 million units in Q415, a 9.7% increase over the same period in 2014, according to Gartner. However, this was the slowest growth rate since 2008. In 2015 as a whole, smartphone sales reached 1.4 billion units, an increase of 14.4% from 2014.
* The share of worldwide corporate IT spending that is funded by non-IT business units is forecast to reach 47% in 2019, an increase of more than 3% over 2015, according to IDC.
* Worldwide IT spending is expected to post a major slowdown in 2016, as economic weakness in emerging markets and saturation of the smartphone market combine to result in a significantly slower pace of tech spending growth compared to the past six years. Having posted annual growth of 5%-6% in constant currency terms since recovery from the financial crisis in 2010, the global IT market is expected to increase by just 2% this year (in constant currency). Total IT spending on hardware, software and services will reach $2.3 trillion in 2016. Including telecoms services, total ICT spending will increase by 2% to $3.8 trillion.

* JSE All share index: Up 0.7%
* Nasdaq: Up 3.8%
* NYSE (Dow): Up 2.6%
* S&P 500: Up 2.8%
* FTSE100: Up 4.3%
* DAX: Up 4.7%
* Nikkei225: Up 6.2%
* Hang Seng: Up 5.3%
* Shanghai: Up 3.5%

International:
* The outcome of a bid by two Baidu executives to buy the Chinese Internet search giant's majority stake in online video platform Qiyi.com, in a deal giving Qiyi an enterprise value of about $2.8 billion.
* The future of Yahoo as it looks to break up and/or sell its Alibaba stake.

South Africa:
* Further news regarding MTN and the Nigerian situation.

Fast Company has published its 'Most Innovative Companies' list for 2016. From a technology perspective, the following were included:

* 1: Buzzfeed
* 2: Facebook
* 5: Netflix
* 6: Amazon
* 7: Apple
* 8: Alphabet
* 13: Huawei
* 14: Cyanogen
* 15: InMobi
* 19: Spotify
* 36: Box
* 37: Fitbit
* 38: Snapchat
* 49: Jaunt