King of the castle

Crown Castle's $7 billion+ acquisition and further consolidations in the online payments sector were the highlights of the international ICT market last week.

At home, the continued rumblings regarding SAP SA were still prominent.

* Very good Q2 revenue numbers from Veeam Software South Africa.
* A positive trading update from Vodacom Group.
* A negative trading update from Ellies.
* Vumatel acquired a large portion of Link Africa's home fibre infrastructure.
* South African fintech Curve Technology Group has expanded to the UK, with the opening of a new office in London.
* The Democratic Alliance will file a criminal complaint against SAP over allegations of corruption involving friends of president Jacob Zuma.
* Technology Corporate Management (TCM) has achieved an elevation on its Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) status to a Level 1 on the amended ICT sector code. TCM's B-BBEE review this year was conducted in accordance with the recently released amended ICT code, which introduces higher targets and priority elements to the industry.
* The appointments of Pieter Bouwer as interim MD of SAP SA; Mark McCallum as Orange Business Services SA country manager; and Niral Patel as MD of Oracle SA.
* The departures of Yannick Decaux, Orange Business Services SA country manager (moved on to a new position within the Orange group); and Kholiwe Makhohliso, MD of Oracle SA.

* The government of Togo has announced the formal transformation of state-owned Togo Telecom Group into a new holding company, Togocom. Under the reorganisation, fixed telephony operator Togo Telecom and mobile arm Togo Cellulaire (Togocel) have been merged into the new entity, but will lose some of their former responsibilities, while a new service-led unit, to be responsible for all convergent and innovative offers (voice and Internet, fixed and mobile) for residential and business customers, has also been established, initially under the temporary banner Togo ServiceCom.
* The Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority has imposed fines amounting to millions of Tanzanian shillings on six mobile network operators for alleged failure to comply with SIM card registration regulations. The operators involved in the investigation were Airtel, Benson Informatics (trading as SMART), MIC (trading as Tigo), Vodacom Tanzania, Zanzibar Telecom (ZANTEL) and Viettel Tanzania (trading as Halotel).
* The appointments of Ali Amer as Cisco's MD for global service provider sales in MEA; Pattison Mutambiranwa as Entersekt's SVP for MEA region; and Marc Terry as Cardtronics' MD of all commercial activities in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Australia.

The Democratic Alliance will file a criminal complaint against SAP.

* Private equity firms Blackstone and CVC Capital Partners proposed a £2.9 billion acquisition of Paysafe Group, a UK-based payments processor.
* Concentrix Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Synnex, bought Tigerspike, a high-value enterprise player in the digital products and strategy market.
* Corning purchased SpiderCloud Wireless, a provider of in-building wireless solutions.
* Crown Castle International acquired LTS Group Holdings (Lightower Fiber Networks) for $7.1 billion.
* Garmin bought Alphamantis Technologies, a privately held designer of aerodynamics testing and measurement technology for the cycling industry.
* Ingenico, a French payments specialist, purchased rival Bambora for EUR1.5 billion.
* Line Thailand acquired DMG59, a software company that will enable it to build up applications and services for the local market.
* Philips bought image-analysis software provider TomTec Imaging Systems.
* Rapid7 purchased Komand, a security orchestration and automation start-up company.
* Private equity group Permira acquired a stake in payments firm Klarna (Sweden), one of Europe's most highly valued tech start-ups.
* Rakuten Viber, a messaging app company, bought Chatter Commerce, a start-up that created a keyboard for mobile commerce called ShopChat.
* French payments company Worldline purchased Swedish peer Digital River World Payments.
* Digital wallet and online retail player Paytm invested in MobiQuest Mobile Technologies.
* Baidu, JD.com and other big Chinese technology firms made a $12 billion investment in the Shanghai-listed unit of China Unicom.
* The following patent and lawsuit activity:
* Qualcomm lost an appeal in its battle against a $665 000 daily fine from the European Union antitrust regulators. The chipmaker was accused of using anticompetitive strategies to squeeze British software maker Icera out of the market.
* Sharp has filed a new patent infringement complaint against Hisense in New York Southern District Court, alleging Hisense and its affiliate companies produce and sell TV products in the US that infringe its WLAN-related patents, and thus seeking damages and an injunction.
* Qualcomm faces a fresh set of antitrust allegations from a group of four companies that assemble the iPhone and other products on behalf of Apple.
* The former head of Spirent Communications' device intelligence business has led a management buyout of Mobilethink Holdings, the parent company of Mobilethink and Tweakker. Mobilethink caters for the needs of tier one network operators by offering a fully-fledged and robust device intelligence suite. Tweakker cloud solutions feature an ultra-fast deployment, cost-efficient operation and pure pay-as-you-grow monthly fee solution specifically designed to answer the needs of any MVNO.
* Shaul Elovitch, chairman and controlling shareholder of Bezeq, Israel's leading telecommunications service provider, has been place under house arrest.
* Very good quarterly figures from Netflix.
* Good quarterly numbers from Adtran, Microsoft, Skyworks Solutions, T-Mobile US and Tessco Technologies.
* Good half-year numbers from ZTE.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from America Movil, ASML Holdings, Benchmark Electronics, Check Point Software Technologies, Crown Castle International, Maxim Integrated Products, Nanya Technology, Rogers Communications, Snap-On, Software AG, Telekom Austria, Ubisoft and Wipro.
* Mediocre quarterly results from IBM, Manhattan Associates, Qualcomm and Syntel.
* Mixed quarterly figures from Alliance Data, with revenue up but profit down; eBay, with revenue up but profit down; NCR, with revenue down but profit up; Omnicom Group, with revenue down but profit up; SAP, with revenue up but profit down; and WNS Holdings, with revenue up but profit down.
* Quarterly losses from Datawatch, Diebold, Ericsson, PTC and Telenor.
* The appointments of Claudia Goya as new CEO of Portugal Telecom; and Rakesh Khanna as CEO of Syntel.
* A satisfactory IPO in Singapore from NetLink NBN Trust, the broadband arm of Singapore Telecom.

* South Africa:
* SA's enterprise application software will grow 1.7% year on year in 2018 to reach a value of $410.05 million, according to IDC.
* According to the findings of the Internet Access in South Africa 2017 study, released by World Wide Worx with the support of Dark Fibre Africa (DFA), the South African Internet user population passed the 20 million mark for the first time last year, reaching 21 million, and it is expected to grow to at least 22.5 million in 2017.

* EMEA/Africa:
* The EMEA traditional PC market (desktops, notebooks and workstations) continued to improve in the second quarter of 2017, with a stable performance of -0.6%, according to IDC. A total of 15.9 million units were shipped.

* Worldwide:
* Market hype and growing interest in artificial intelligence (AI) are pushing established software vendors to introduce AI into their product strategy, creating considerable confusion in the process, according to Gartner. Analysts predict that by 2020, AI technologies will be virtually pervasive in almost every new software product and service.
* Worldwide spending on public cloud services and infrastructure is forecast to reach $266 billion in 2021, according to IDC. Although spending growth will slow somewhat over the 2016-2021 forecast period, the market is expected to achieve a five-year CAGR of 21%. Public cloud services spending will reach $128 billion in 2017, an increase of 25.4% over 2016.

* JSE All share index: Up 1.1%
* FTSE100: Up 1%
* DAX: Down 3.1%
* NYSE (Dow): Down 0.3%
* S&P 500: Up 0.5%
* Nasdaq: Up 1.2% (highest-ever weekend close)
* Nikkei225: Down 0.1%
* Hang Seng: Up 1.2% (highest weekend close this year)
* Shanghai: Up 0.5%

* International:
* The sell-off of Hutchison Global Communications, a unit of Hutchison Telecommunications Hong Kong Holdings, which provides a range of fixed-line telecommunications services in Hong Kong and overseas for corporate and residential users. A consortium of private equity firms, including TPG Capital Management and MBK Partners, and investment manager I Squared Capital Advisors, have put in separate bids for the fixed-line phone unit of Hong Kong's richest man, Li Ka-Shing.
* Indian e-commerce player Flipkart buying out its smaller rival Snapdeal, following a sweetened deal valued at between $900 million and $950 million.

* Africa:
* Bharti Airtel merging its Nigerian arm with embattled 9mobile.

* South Africa:
* Further news regarding government's Broadband Infraco and Sentech future.

African Business magazine has just published its 2017 'Africa's top 250 companies' list, which is ranked by market capitalisation. The list includes:

* 1: Naspers (was 3)
* 7: Vodacom Group (was 8)
* 9: MTN Group (was 7)
* 10: Maroc Telecom (was 12)
* 23: Safaricom (was 23)
* 42: Sonatel (was 35) (Senegal)
* 49: Telkom SA (was 61)
* 75: Global Telecom Holding (Egypt) (was 67)
* 89: EOH (was 89)
* 111: Reunert (was 115)
* 115: Telecom Egypt (was 77)
* 123: Datatec (was 144)
* 132: Vodafone Egypt (was 108)
* 140: Blue Label Telecom (was 141)
* 158: Econet Wireless (was 214)
* 175: Net 1 UEPS Technologies (new entrant)
* 179: Onatel (Burkina Faso) (was 116)
* 186: Orange Egypt (was 84)
* 235: Artel Networks Zambia (was 240)
* 248: Altron (new entrant)

Notes:
* The overall value of the 250 has dropped 4% year on year to $732 billion.
* The top 10 includes only one non-South African company.
* There are no IT companies in the list outside of SA.
* Datatec is classified as an electrical equipment, instrumentation and components company!
* Naspers is still classified as a media company.