Salesforce buys Tableau in deal of the decade

Salesforce’s Tableau acquisition dominated the international ICT market last week.

At home, Naspers’ latest acquisition was one of the main local stories.

• A half-year loss from Labat Africa, despite a 461.5% rise in revenue.

• Mixed year-end figures from Capital Appreciation, a fintech group, with revenue up 19.6% but trading profit down 7.5%.

• A full-year loss from YeboYethu.

• Mixed trading updates from MultiChoice Group and Naspers.

• A negative trading update from Etion.

• Alviva acquired Synerg Group, which helps businesses to leverage software in order to achieve operational efficiency in all areas of a business, from operations to human capital. The deal was worth R90.1 million.

• Naspers’ PayU bought Iyzico, a Turkish digital payments firm, for $2.4 billion.

• Siemens Digital Industries Software has signed an agreement to acquire assets of SA-based ESTEQ, a distributor of product life cycle management, product design and simulation, and manufacturing operations software and services.

• Travelstart, an online travel agency, purchased SA-based Club Travel Group.

• The merged departments of communications and telecommunications and postal services will be known as the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies.

• A renewed JSE cautionary by AYO Technology Solutions.

• Ethiopia is aiming to award telco licences to multinational mobile companies by the end of the year, ending a state monopoly and opening up one of the world's last major closed telecoms markets.

• Swedish ICT giant Epson Europe will set up an office in Zimbabwe.

• The appointment of Markus Sebastian as Align Technology’s VP for the EMEA region.

• The departure of Simon Beard, EMEA SVP for Align Technology.

• Apollo Global Management acquired Shutterfly (for $2.7 billion) and Snapfish, which the private equity giant plans to combine to create a bigger player in online photo services.

• Dassault Systemes bought Medidata, a US-based software firm for clinical trials, for $5.8 billion.

• Canada-based Enghouse Systems purchased Espial, a provider of next-generation, cloud-based software that enables video service providers or operators to deliver video and entertainment services. The company also bought Sweden’s ProOpti, a Nordic software provider in the telecoms expense management and technology optimisation management sectors, as well as Vidyo, a provider of enterprise-class video software solutions that support visual communications across diverse end-points, networks of varying bandwidth and geographically dispersed locations.

• Epic Games, the make of ‘Fortnite’, acquired Houseparty, the video-chat app.

• HF Company bought VOXX International’s German Accessory Holdings, which comprises the operations of Oehlbach Kabel and Schwaiger, for $19 million.

• Intel purchased start-up Barefoot Networks in a bid to scale up the smaller company’s networking chip technology to compete against Broadcom.

Huawei has applied to trademark its Hongmeng operating system in at least nine countries.

• PTC has acquired Twnkls, an augmented reality services firm, and hired a McKinsey executive to start a new digital transformation solutions group in a bid to accelerate customer adoption of its software.

• RealPage, a leading global provider of software and data analytics to the real estate industry, bought almost all of the assets of CRE Global Enterprises, a holding company for Hipercept, which provides data services and data analytic solutions to institutional real estate owners, with over $500 billion in assets under management.

• Salesforce.com acquired Tableau Software, an analytics firm, for $15.7 billion.

• VMware bought Avi Networks, a leader in multi-cloud application delivery services.

• Facebook invested in a stake in Indian e-commerce start-up Meesho.

• Private equity firm TPG will buy gaming-as-a-service provider Accel Entertainment in a deal that will give the gaming firm an enterprise value of about $884 million and a public listing.

• China has officially launched Shanghai’s Nasdaq-style tech board, with the country’s top securities regulator cautioning that the hotly anticipated Star Market will face various challenges initially.

• Huawei Technologies has told Verizon the carrier should pay licensing fees of about $1 billion on over 200 of its patents, thus escalating tensions between the Chinese company and the US.

• Huawei has applied to trademark its Hongmeng operating system in at least nine countries, including Canada and Cambodia, as well as in Europe, in a sign it may be deploying a backup plan in key markets, as US sanctions threaten its business model.

• Good year-end numbers from Codemasters Group Holdings and SheerID.

• Satisfactory quarterly results from Enghouse Systems.

• Satisfactory half-year numbers from Oxford Metrics.

• Satisfactory year-end figures from Elektron Technology, Iomart Group, Soitec and Volex.

• Mediocre quarterly results from Cheetah Mobile.

• Mediocre year-end numbers from CML Microsystems and Eckoh.

• Mixed quarterly figures from Broadcom, with revenue up but net income down.

• Quarterly losses from Finisar, Renren, Slack Technologies and Tufin Software Technologies.

• A full-year loss from Avanti Communications.

• The appointments of Ryan O’Hara as CEO of Shutterfly; and William Bishop as interim CEO of Alaska Communications.

• The departures of Christopher North, CEO of Shutterfly; and Anand Vadapalli, CEO of Alaska Communications.

• The death of Gary Burrell, co-founder of Garmin.

• An IPO filing for Hong Kong from Alibaba Group Holding.

• An excellent IPO on Nasdaq by CrowdStrike Holdings, a cyber security company.

EMEA/Africa:

• According to IDC:

• The MEA personal computing devices market, which is made up of desktops, notebooks, workstations and tablets, declined 13.4% year on year in Q119.

• The EMEA smartphone market reached 83.7 million units in Q119, a 3.3% drop on the same quarter last year. The total value was down more steeply, at $26 780 million at retail value before sales tax, just over 10% less than in Q118. Feature phone sales reached 45.9 million units, more than two-thirds of which were shipments to Africa.

• Africa's smartphone market saw a 7.1% decline in QOQ shipments in Q119 to total 21.5 million units. The continent's two biggest markets, Nigeria and SA, underperformed due to seasonal effects, posting QOQ declines of 14.7% and 23.4% respectively

Worldwide:

• Global shipments of NB-IOT (narrowband) devices reached 53 million units in 2018 and are expected to almost triple in 2019 to 142 million units, according to Berg Insight.

• Global cellular IOT module shipments increased by 16% in 2018 to a new record level of 221 million, according to Berg Insight. Annual revenue grew faster, at 24%, reversing the previous trend of decreasing average module prices.

• Worldwide all-in-one PC shipments are expected to shrink 5% on year to arrive at only 12.8 million in 2019, a weaker performance than expected previously because of the US-China trade tensions and Intel's ongoing CPU shortages, according to Digitimes Research.

• Worldwide spending on the IOT is forecast to pass the $1 trillion mark in 2022, reaching $1 trillion in 2023, according to IDC. It predicts the CAGR for IOT spending over the 2019-2023 forecast period will be 12.6%.

• The roll-out of 5G is forecast to contribute $700 billion to the global economy by 2030, with a CAGR of 20%, according to IDTechEx.

• JSE All share index: Up 0.2%

• FTSE100: Up 0.2%

• DAX: Up 0.4%

• NYSE (Dow): Up 0.4%

• S&P 500: Up 0.4%

• Nasdaq: Up 0.5%

• Nikkei225: Up 1.1%

• Hang Seng: Up 0.6%

• Shanghai: Up 1.9%

International:

• Further developments or fallouts from the US/China trade battle.

South Africa:

• A possible buyer for Webafrica, an ISP that was established in 1997.

African Business magazine has recently published its listing of Africa’s top brands. Included in the top 50, from a technology perspective, are:

• 3: Samsung

• 5: Tecno

• 7: Apple

• 8: MTN

• 10: LG

• 13: Airtel

• 14: Vodafone.com/Safaricom/M-Pesa

• 15: Nokia

• 17: Itel Mobile

• 18: Huawei

• 22: Orange

• 23: Sony

• 26: Infinix Mobile

• 27: Google/Android

• 30: Global

• 31: Econet

• 34: HP

• 36: Toshiba

• 45: DStv