Huawei gets the cold shoulder

The fall-out from US president Donald Trump's Chinese technology ban dominated the international ICT market last week.

At home it was extremely quiet.

* Thesele Group made a 40% investment in Knowledge Integration Dynamics (KID), marking the investment holding company's first foray into the ICT space, and making KID South Africa's largest black-owned focused data management solutions company.
* A renewed JSE cautionary by EOH.

* Good year-end figures from Ecobank Ghana, with revenue up 17% and PBT up 41%.
* Safaricom has extended the tenure of Bob Collymore, its current CEO, for 12 months.
* Xiaomi has dismissed the head of its Africa division for violating a Chinese law pertaining to indecent public behaviour.
* The appointments of Irene Charnley as deputy chairman of Smile Telecoms; and Ahmad Farroukh as group CEO of Smile Telecoms.

* Alliance Data Systems acquired most of the assets of Blispay, a financial technology start-up.
* Champion Solutions Group bought DirecLogix, a fast-growing solution provider.
* DISH Network purchased EchoStar's Broadcast Satellite Service Business for $800 million.
* Freshworks, a global innovator in customer engagement software, acquired Natero, a leading customer success management software company.
* Marvell Technology Group bought the Avera Semiconductor chip-design unit, which was previously owned by IBM, from Globalfoundries, adding the ability to produce more specialised semiconductors needed for 5G phone networks and cloud data centres. The deal was worth $650 million.
* US payments technology firm Nuvei purchased SafeCharge International Group for $889 million, in a deal that is expected to allow the former to expand in the fast-growing electronic payments industry.
* Tetra Tech acquired UK-based WYG, a professional services firm.
* Toshiba Memory bought preferred shares held by Apple, Dell, Kingston Technology and Seagate Technology for $4.5 billion.
* Growth capital investors Lead Edge Capital, Lone Pine Capital and Vitruvian Partners led a $292 million investment in money transfer start-up TransferWise.

Nokia has been sued in the US for allegedly conspiring to inflate patent licence rates.

* Landmark European privacy law GDPR is making waves worldwide a year after it came into force, fundamentally changing the way data is handled, as Apple, Facebook and Google face increasingly frequent complaints.
* A US judge has ruled that Qualcomm illegally suppressed competition in the market for smartphone chips by threatening to cut off supplies and extracting excessive licensing fees, a decision that could force the company to overhaul its business practices.
* Nokia has been sued in the US for allegedly conspiring to inflate patent licence rates. The suit was filed by German auto parts supplier Continental Automotive Systems, which accused Nokia, a company known as Avanci, and two other patent-holders of co-ordinating to charge exorbitant rates for access to patents pertaining to 2G, 3G and 4G wireless technologies.
* Google has suspended business with Huawei that requires the transfer of hardware, software and technical services, except those publicly available via open source licensing.
* German chipmaker Infineon and several other companies have suspended shipments to Huawei Technologies.
* The Irish Data Protection Commission has started an inquiry into the way Google provides advertising services across the European Union.
* The US Commerce Department, in a concession, will allow Huawei Technologies to purchase American-made goods in order to maintain existing networks and provide software updates to existing Huawei handsets.
* Very good half-year figures from APC Technology Group, Endava and Viomi Technology.
* Good quarterly numbers from Intuit, Lenovo, ViaSat (back in the black), Weibo and Xiaomi.
* Good year-end numbers from Electrocomponents.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from Formula Systems, Mobile TeleSystems, Sina and Synopsys.
* Mediocre quarterly results from Analog Devices, DXC Technology and HPE.
* Mixed quarterly figures from HP, Opera and Photronics, with revenue up but net income down; and from ePlus, International Game Technology (but back in the black), and NetApp, with revenue down but net income up.
* Quarterly losses from Pinduoduo, Pure Storage, Qutoutiao, SEA and Splunk.
* A half-year loss from Cerillion.
* A full-year loss from TalkTalk.
* The appointments of Jane Annear as CEO of Concurrent Technologies; Allen Waugerman as CEO of Lexmark; and Andy Yang as CEO of Indiegogo.
* The departure of David Mandelbrot, CEO of Indiegogo.
* A planned IPO from Slack Technologies, owner of the workplace instant messaging app, in a direct listing on the NYSE.

Worldwide:
* Worldwide shipments of hardcopy peripherals decreased 3.9% year-over-year to 22.8 million units in 1Q19, with the brightest spot for the quarter the year-on-year expansion of colour inkjet MFPs in the 11ppm-20ppm range, which grew 4.7% to more than 6.2 million units shipped, according to IDC.
* Worldwide shipments of connected vehicles, which includes options for embedded and aftermarket cellular connectivity, will reach 51.1 million units in 2019, an increase of 45.4% over 2018, according to IDC. By 2023, it expects worldwide shipments to reach 76.3 million units, with a five-year CAGR of 16.8%.
* The number of devices connected to the Internet reached 22 billion worldwide at the end of 2018, according to Strategy Analytics.

* JSE All share index: Down 3.1%
* FTSE100: Down 1%
* DAX: Down 1.9%
* NYSE (Dow): Down 0.7%
* S&P 500: Down 1.2%
* Nasdaq: Down 2.3%
* Nikkei225: Down 0.6%
* Hang Seng: Down 2.1%
* Shanghai: Down 1%

International:
* Global Payments doing a deal with Total System Services.

South Africa:
* Further developments regarding EOH.

Fortune magazine recently published its 2019 Top 500 list. The following changes were noted from a technology perspective:

Newcomers:
* 150: Broadcom
* 327: Altice USA
* 460: AMD
* 472: Analog Devices
* 482: Intuit

Most progressive:
* 122: DXC Technology (was 374)
* 287: Lam Research (was 354)
* 197: Netflix (was 261)
* 339: Adobe (was 389)
* 240: Salesforce.com (was 285)
* 105: Micro Technology (was 150)
* 268: Nvidia (was 306)

Most regressive:
* 332: First Data (was 254)
* 474: Harris (was 407)
* 165: Avnet (was 128)
* 465: NCR (was 432)
* 355: Frontier Communications (was 325)
* 232: DISH Network (was 203)
* 248: Viacom (was 221)
* 318: Xerox (was 291)

No longer in the 500 list:
* Conduent (was 466)