Tencent buys 84.3% stake in Supercell

Dell's sell-off and Tencent's buy dominated the international ICT market last week.

At home, the new appointments at MTN were the highlights in the local ICT market.

* Disappointing year-end figures from Naspers, with revenue down 9.7% and profit down 20.6% (reporting in US$ for the first time).
* A positive trading update from Ansys.
* MTN SA will dispose of its 50.02% stake in Afrihost to the ISP's management team.
* A renewed JSE cautionary by ISA.
* The appointments of Isaac Mophatlane as the new CEO of the merged BCX and Telkom Business entities; and Rob Shuter (ex-Vodafone Group) as president and CEO of the MTN Group.
* The move by Phuthuma Nhleko back to his position as non-executive chairman of the MTN Group (was executive chairman), as soon as the new CEO assumes his position.

* Orange, together with its subsidiary, Orange C^ote d'Ivoire, acquired Airtel in Burkina Faso.
* Oi has agreed a share-swap deal with investment partner Samba Luxco that will see it up its stake in African telco holding company Africatel, but cede its entire 34% holding in MTC Namibia. Under the terms of the arrangement, Oi increases its holding in Africatel to 86% from 75%, leaving Samba Luxco, an affiliate of Helios Investors, with a 14% stake. Meanwhile, Samba Luxco takes Africatel's stake in MTC. Assets still held by Oi via Africatel include stakes in Angola's Unitel, Cabo Verde Telecom, and CST in S~ao Tom'e and Pr'incipe.
* The appointment of Godfrey Motsa (ex-Vodacom) as VP South & East Africa region (excluding RSA) for the MTN Group.

MTN SA will dispose of its 50.02% stake in Afrihost.

* Accenture bought Maglan, a privately held Israeli cyber security company specialising in offensive cyber simulation, vulnerability countermeasures, cyber forensics and malware defences; and IT security research and development with a focus on threat intelligence.
* Alarm.com purchased two business units, Connect and Piper, from Icontrol Networks for $140 million. Connect provides an interactive security and home automation platform that powers several service providers' solutions, and Piper designs, produces and sells a WiFi-enabled video and home automation hub.
* Comcast acquired Icontrol Networks, an IOT start-up.
* Buyout firm Francisco Partners and the private equity arm of activist hedge fund, Elliott Management, bought Dell's software division, which includes Quest Software and SonicWALL, but excludes Dell's Boomi cloud integration business. The deal was worth $2 billion.
* Intent Media, a privately held company that provides advertising tools for online travel agencies such as Expedia, is buying software start-up Voyat in a bid to take travel ad dollars from search giants such as Alphabet's Google.
* JD.com acquired Yihaodina, Walmart's Chinese e-commerce business.
* Koninklijke Philips bought PathXL, a company in digital pathology image analysis, workflow software, and educational tools.
* Magic Software Enterprises purchased a 60% equity interest in Roshtov Software Industries, the developer of the Clicks development platform.
* Masmovil acquired Yoigo, Spain's self-declared fourth national operator, giving parent Telia Company its long-awaited route out of Spain. The deal was worth EUR625 million.
* Open Text Corporation bought the Customer Communications Management (CCM) assets from HP, including HP Exstream, HP Output Management, HP TeleForm and HP LiquidOffice for customer communications management, process automation and document delivery solutions. The deal was worth $310 million.
* Red Hat purchased 3Scale, an API management technology start-up.
* SMIC acquired LFoundry Europe and Marsica Innovation, an integrated circuit wafer foundry headquartered in Italy, in a deal worth EUR49 million (60%).
* Stamps.com bought ShippingEasy, a company that offers Web-based multi-carrier shipping software that allows online retailers and e-commerce merchants to organise, process, fulfil and ship their orders quickly and easily.
* Tele2 (Sweden) purchased TDC Sweden for $352 million.
* Tencent and its partners are buying an 84.3% stake in Supercell from Japan's SoftBank Group and the start-up's current and former employees.
* Twitter acquired Magic Pony Technology, a company that has developed novel machine learning techniques for visual processing, in a deal worth $150 million.
* Verizon Communications bought Telogis, a transportation software provider.
* A strategic partnership was formed between Nice and Speakerbus, a specialist provider of critical voice collaboration solutions for global financial markets. The two companies have developed an integration of the Nice Trading Recording system with the voice communication system from Speakerbus, allowing for calls made on the Speakerbus platform to be recorded on secure Nice recording systems.
* The following patent and lawsuit activity:
* Beijing's intellectual property regulators have barred sales of Apple's iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, saying the designs had infringed a patent held by a Chinese company, although the ruling has stayed pending an appeal.
* The ITC has issued a final determination regarding the five patents involved in the Arista Networks/Cisco case. Two were non-violations, one was withdrawn and the other two found against Arista.
* Qualcomm has filed a lawsuit against smartphone maker Meizu in China over the payment of licensing fees.
* Nice Systems is changing its name to Nice.
* Oi SA, Brazil's fourth largest mobile operator, has filed for Brazil's largest ever bankruptcy protection on Monday, after the country's number one fixed-line phone carrier ran out of time to reorganise operations and restructure $19.3 billion of debt amid a harsh recession.
* Good quarterly numbers from Adobe and Red Hat.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from Accenture and American Software.
* Mediocre quarterly results from Methode Electronics.
* Mixed quarterly figures from Formula Systems, with revenue up but profit down; Koninklijke Philips, with revenue up but profit down; and Synnex, with revenue up but profit down.
* Quarterly losses from BlackBerry.
* The appointments of Abdelkrim Benamar as CEO of Astellia; Ursula Burns as chairman of the 'new' Xerox (was CEO of the old Xerox); Mike Combes as CEO of Altice; Dexter Goei as president of Altice and head of its US operations (was CEO of Altice); Jim Henderson as CEO of ModusLink Global Solutions; Jeff Jacobson as CEO of the 'new' Xerox, following the split; Warren Lichtenstein as executive chairman of ModusLink Global Solutions; Ken Miyauchi as president and COO of Softbank; Matthew Murphy as CEO of Marvell Technology; and Christian Queffelec as chairman of Astellia (was CEO and the co-founder).
* The resignations of Nikesh Arora, president of Softbank; Mike Lawrie, chairman of CSRA; and Tom Klein, president and CEO of Sabre (as of 31 December 2016).
* A planned IPO in August by Vodafone for its Indian operation.
* An excellent IPO on the NYSE by Twilio, a communications software provider.

EMEA/Africa:
* Governments in the Middle East and North Africa will spend $11.5 billion on IT products and services in 2016, according to Gartner.
* Healthcare providers in the Middle East and North Africa will spend $2.78 billion on IT products and services in 2016, according to Gartner.

Worldwide:
* The total worldwide PC monitor market shipped more than 29 million units in 1Q16, up 0.5% year over year, but a decrease of 5.7% compared to the previous quarter, according to IDC.
* The worldwide converged systems market increased revenue 11% year over year to $2.5 billion during 1Q16, according to IDC. The market generated 1.367 petabytes of new storage capacity shipments during the quarter, which was up 36.2% compared to the same period a year ago.

* JSE All share index: Down 0.9%
* Nasdaq: Down 1.9%
* NYSE (Dow): Down 1.6%
* S&P 500: Down 1.6%
* FTSE100: Up 2%
* DAX: Down 0.8%
* Nikkei225: Down 4.3%
* Hang Seng: Up 0.4%
* Shanghai: Down 1.1%

International:
* Ant Financial Services Group, Alibaba's financial services affiliate, buying a 20% stake in Ascend Money, an online payment provider based in Thailand.
* McKesson, one of the largest US drug distributors, merging its IT unit with healthcare technology company Change Healthcare. A combination of McKesson's IT unit with Change Healthcare would create one of the biggest players in the healthcare information technology sector.
* An IPO from or the sale of Oktac, a US cloud identity management company valued at $1.2 billion.
* A possible IPO from O2, the UK telecommunications company owned by Telefonica.

South Africa:
* Further news regarding Cell C's future.

Fortune magazine has just released its 2016 Fortune 500 listing of America's largest companies. Some further analysis, from a technology perspective, shows the following:

Biggest movers:
* Alliance Data Systems (up to 404 from 494)
* Cognizant Technology Solutions (up to 230 from 288)
* eBay (down to 300 from 172)
* Facebook (up to 157 from 242)
* Jabil Circuit (up to 158 from 191)
* Level 3 Communications (up to 333 from 401)
* Netflix (up to 379 from 474)
* Salesforce.com (up to 386 from 483)
* SanDisk (down to 464 from 408)
New and returning entrants:
* Fiserv at 492 (returning, with last appearance at 491 in 2010)
* Frontier Communications at 461 (returning, with last appearance at 492 in 2013)
* Lam Research at 491 (563 in 2015)
* PayPal at 307 (new, spin-off from eBay)
* Telephone & Data Systems (returning, with last appearance at 468 in 2013)
Drop-outs from the Fortune 500:
* Applied Micro Devices (was 473, now 593)