Facebook gets lashes

Another Accenture acquisition and ones by Apple and VMware were the main stories of the international ICT market last week.

At home, Vodacom's Safaricom transaction and the departure of EOH's CEO dominated the local scene.

* Satisfactory year-end figures from Vodacom, with revenue up 1.5% and profit up 1.7%.
* Excellent year-end profit figures from Vodacom's BEE empowerment scheme, YeboYethu.
* Positive trading updates from Ansys, Huge Group, MICROmega Holdings and TCS (still a loss forecast).
* JSE-listed speciality finance company Capital Appreciation acquired financial technology firm Synthesis for R132.1 million.
* The appointment of Zunaid Mayet as CEO of EOH.
* The departure of Asher Bohbot, founder and CEO of EOH.

* Good year-end figures from Vodacom Tanzania, with profit up 63.4%.
* Satisfactory quarterly figures from Sudatel, with revenue up 5.2% and profit up 98.1%.
* Very good quarterly figures from Helios Towers Africa, with revenue up 71.3% and EBITDA up 22.5%.
* The Zimbabwean government made a $5 million investment in Telecel.
* Vodacom Group made a R34.6 billion investment - of a 34.94% indirect interest in Safaricom from Vodafone International Holdings - by acquiring 87.5% of the issued share capital of Vodafone Kenya.
* Cellcom Liberia is to become Orange Liberia, following Orange's acquisition of the Liberian operation of Cellcom.
* The Rwanda Utilities Regulatory Authority has imposed a fine of $8.5 million on MTN Rwanda as a result of failure to comply with licence obligations.
* Seacom has launched new points of presence in Botswana and Rwanda.

Biz Stone, a co-founder of Twitter, has returned to the company.

* Accenture acquired Media Hive, an e-commerce solutions provider with expertise in cross-channel commerce strategy, custom application development, and the creation of innovative retail experiences for any device.
* Apple bought Lattice Data, an AI firm, for $200 million.
* Axiata Business Services, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Malaysian telecom conglomerate Axiata Group, purchased a 65% stake in Thai IT solution provider Suvitech in an $11.05 million acquisition.
* Coupa Software acquired Riskopy, the provider of an analytics engine that combines conventional and alternative data sources in a proprietary algorithm.
* ePlus bought OneCloud Consulting, a versatile team of highly trained technology consultants, architects, developers and instructors.
* Mitel purchased selected UC assets and support contracts from Toshiba.
* Moody's acquired Bureau van Dijk, a Dutch business intelligence company, for EUR3 billion.
* NGDATA, a customer experience management solutions company, bought US-based Eccella, a data management and analytics consultancy.
* Orange purchased a controlling stake in Business & Decision, an international consulting and systems integration group.
* Pixelworks acquired Canada-based ViXS Systems, a pioneer in media processing, encoding and transcoding solutions.
* Cloud service provider RapidScale bought Vonage's hosted infrastructure services business, in a move to expand its desktop as a service portfolio for partners.
* ServiceNow purchased Qlue, with plans to further increase productivity for its customers and enhance their experiences by applying artificial intelligence to routine service desk conversations with Qlue's virtual agent messaging capabilities.
* VMware acquired Apteligent, maker of application performance software.
* ServiceNow Ventures invested in BuildOnMe, an early-stage company delivering artificial intelligence-enabled applications on the Now Platform.
* Sharp made a $1 billion investment in Softbank's 'Vision' tech fund.
* Qualcomm has filed a lawsuit against four Apple contract manufacturers, including Foxconn Technology Group, for not paying royalties, as its legal battle with the iPhone maker intensifies. The other manufacturers listed in the filing are Compal Electronics, Pegatron and Wistron.
* Facebook has been fined EUR150 000 by France's data protection watchdog for failing to prevent its users' data from being accessed by advertisers; and it has been fined $123 million by the EU for misleading it over its WhatsApp buyout.
* Biz Stone, a co-founder of Twitter, has returned to the company.
* Excellent quarterly results from Alibaba, Tencent Holdings and Weibo.
* Very good quarterly figures from Pixart Image and Sina.
* Good quarterly numbers from Applied Materials, Magic Software and Salesforce.com.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from ATS, Bouygues Telecom (back in the black), Iliad, Lextar Electronics (back in the black) and LG Display (back in the black).
* Mediocre quarterly results from Clevo.
* Mediocre year-end numbers from Tong Hsing Electronic Industries.
* Mixed quarterly figures from Cisco, with revenue down but profit up; Formula Systems, with revenue up but profit down; Inventec, with revenue up but profit down; MAM Software, with revenue down but profit up; and Synopsys, with revenue up but profit down.
* Mixed year-end figures from Internet Initiative Japan, with revenue up but profit down.
* Very poor quarterly figures from Acer and Photronics.
* Quarterly losses from Acxiom, Autodesk, Gilat Satellite Networks, GlassBridge Enterprises, Renren, Sapiens, Stratasys and Top Image Systems.
* Full-year losses from Sophos and Vodafone.
* The appointments of Peter McKay and co-founder Andrei Baronov as co-CEOs of Veeam Software; and David Xueling Li as acting CEO of YY.
* The resignations of Zhou Chen, CEO of YY; and Chick Swoboda, chairman and CEO of Cree.
* The departure of William Largent, CEO of Veeam Software (moves elsewhere within company).
* A disappointing IPO in Canada by Real Matters, a real estate data and software firm, in the first major initial public offering by a Canadian technology company in two years.

Worldwide:
* There will be 35.08 million tablets shipped globally during Q217, decreasing 5.7% on quarter and 13.7% on year, according to Digitimes Research.
* Worldwide semiconductor revenue totalled $343.5 billion in 2016, a 2.6% increase from 2015 revenue of $334.9 billion, according to Gartner. The top 25 semiconductor vendors' combined revenue increased 10.5%, a significantly better performance than the overall industry's growth; however, most of this growth resulted from merger and acquisition activity.

* JSE All share index: Up 0.7%
* FTSE100: Up 0.5% (all-time high reached during the week)
* DAX: Down 1%
* NYSE (Dow): Down 0.4%
* S&P 500: Down 0.4%
* Nasdaq: Down 0.6%
* Nikkei225: Down 1.5%
* Hang Seng: Up 0.1%
* Shanghai: Up 0.2%

International:
* The twists and turns in the jostling for Toshiba's chip business, with KKR & Co, Bain Capital and US chipmaker Broadcom among the suitors.

South Africa:
* Naspers selling its pay-television business in Africa.

Fast Company has released its "most creative people in business 2017" list.

Included are:
* 2: Fidji Simo, VP of product at Facebook, for unlocking the emotion and value of live video.
* 3: Todd Yellin, VP of Product at Netflix, for figuring out how the world watches.
* 4: Diane Greene, SVP, Google Cloud, Google, for bringing the thunder to enterprise computing.
* 6: Isabel Mahe, VP of Wireless Technologies at Apple, for creating magic out of thin air.
* 9: Rohit Prasad, VP and head scientist, Alexa, Amazon, for leading the voice-controlled revolution.
* 10: Toni Reia, VP, Echo Device, Alexa, Amazon, for leading the voice-controlled revolution.
* 15: De Liu, co-founder and VP, Xiaomi, for seeding a consumer products boom.
* 19 and 20: Amy and Sam Molyneux, co-founders of Meta, for using AI to streamline scientific research.
* 26: Claire Hughes Johnson, COO, Stripe, for facilitating online payments across borders.
* 28: Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder and CEO of Paytm, for rescuing India's small businesses.