US charges Huawei with raft of offences

Paul Booth.

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The latest US charges against Huawei dominated the international ICT market last week.

At home, it was a quiet week.

* Mediocre interim numbers from Adapt IT, with revenue down 1.3% and profit down 5.5%.
* Mixed interim figures from Ellies, with revenue down 2.77% but profit up 288.8%.
* Mixed quarterly numbers from MiX Telematics, with revenue up 16.3% but profit down 3.7%.
* A positive trading update from Ellies.
* TechSoft International, formerly TIBCO SA, is now the exclusive distributor of TIBCO Software products in Sub-Saharan Africa. The companies announced a partnership whereby TechSoft will be TIBCO's strategic regional partner, with level one broad-based black economic empowerment status.
* Uniconta, an ERP system for small and medium-sized businesses, has opened its first African office in Cape Town. It plans to establish itself in Southern Africa and then move on to other African countries such as Kenya and Uganda.
* The appointment of Akesh Lalla as country manager for SAS Institute.

* AirTies, the most widely deployed provider of managed in-home WiFi solutions to global service providers, acquired Technicolor's in-home WiFi management software business, Wireless Doctor.
* CACI International bought LGS Innovations, a provider of surveillance, reconnaissance and cyber security products, for $750 million. CACI has also acquired Mastodon Design, an expert in the rapid design and manufacturing of rugged signals intelligence, electronic warfare, and cyber operations products and solutions.
* Check Point Software purchased ForceNock, a cyber security start-up.
* Cisco acquired Singularity Networks to deepen its network insight for its service provider customers and MSP partners.
* Descartes Systems Group has signed a definitive agreement to buy the businesses run by the Management Systems Resources group of companies operating under the names Visual Compliance, eCustoms and MSR.
* Dropbox purchased HelloSign, an electronic signature company, for $230 million.
* DXC Technology acquired the services business EG A/S, a leading integrator of Microsoft Dynamics 365 in northern Europe.
* FLIR Systems bought Aeryon Labs, a leading developer of high-performance unmanned aerial systems for the global military, public safety and critical infrastructure markets. The deal was worth $200 million.
* ID Systems purchased the US-based assets of CarrierWeb, a US-based provider of real-time in-cab mobile communications technology, electronic logging devices), two-way refrigerated command and control, and trailer tracking.

Reliance Communications is to file for insolvency as the Indian telco struggles to make debt repayments.

* Intel acquired Israel's Mellanox Technologies, a maker of chips and other hardware for data centre servers that power cloud computing, for $6 billion.
* Mimecast bought Simply Migrate, a data migration start-up.
* OpenText purchased Catalyst Repository Systems, a leading provider of eDiscovery solutions for corporate legal departments and top law firms.
* Orange acquired UK-based SecureData Group, the UK's largest independent cyber security provider.
* Teradyne bought Swiss-based Lemsys, a leading global provider of test equipment for the high-power semiconductor industry. Lemsys serves the emerging and growing power discrete device and module market aligned to electric vehicles, wind and solar power generation, and high-power industrial applications.
* Zebra Technologies purchased Temptime, a privately held developer and manufacturer of temperature monitoring solutions for mission-critical applications in the healthcare industry.
* ZephyrTel, an ESW Capital software company dedicated to serving the global telecommunications industry, acquired ResponseTek's telco business.
* NetEase Games, the online games division of NetEase, bought a minority stake in Quantic Dream SA, to further the development and distribution of global online games.
* Huawei has been charged in the US for a raft of offences, including conspiracy to defraud the US, bank fraud and theft of trade secrets from T-Mobile.
* A German court dismissed four patent lawsuits from Qualcomm against Apple, the second victory this month for the tech giant in a continued global legal battle with the chipmaker.
* Entegris and Versum Materials are to merge into a company with a combined value of about $9 billion, with Entegris shareholders owning a 52.5% stake.
* Reliance Communications is to file for insolvency as the Indian telco struggles to make debt repayments.
* Very good quarterly figures from Alibaba, Align Technology, Digital International (back in the black), Facebook, General Dynamics, Harris, Mercury Systems and ServiceNow (back in the black).
* Good quarterly numbers from Amazon.com, AudioCodes, Booz Allen Hamilton, Bottomline Technologies, Celestica, Corning (back in the black), Fair Isaac, IDT (back in the black), II-VI, Key Tronic (back in the black), KLA-Tencor (back in the black), Microsoft (back in the black), Nintendo and Sanmina (back in the black).
* Good year-end numbers from Coretronic.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from AMD (back in the black), Anixter International, CGI Group, CommVault Systems (back in the black), Cypress Semiconductor (back in the black), eBay (back in the black), Extreme Networks (back in the black), HCL Technologies, Nokia (back in the black), Open Text, Silicon Labs (back in the black), Sirius XM (back in the black), Sogue, Sony and Symantec.
* Satisfactory year-end figures from Novoton Technology.
* Mediocre quarterly results from Apple, BT Group, Changyou, Chunghwa Telecom, Cirrus Logic, Coherent, LG Electronics, Kulicke & Soffa, MKS Instruments, Samsung Electronics, Tetra Tech and Total Systems Services.
* Mixed quarterly figures from ADP, ASE Technology, AT&T, CACI International, Charter Communications, Check Point Software, Eaton, L3 Technologies, ON Semiconductor, PayPal, Roper Technologies, SAP, Telenor and Verizon Communications, with revenue up but net income down; and from Juniper Networks (but back in the black), LG Display, Maxim Integrated Products (but back in the black), MicroStrategy (but back in the black), Qualcomm (but back in the black), Silicon Motion Technology, Sohu.com (but back in the black) and Xerox (but back in the black), with revenue down but net income up.
* Mixed year-end figures from Software AG, with revenue down but net income up.
* Quarterly losses from 8x8, AU Optronics, Cree, EFI, Flex, Inphi, Limelight Networks, Mitek, NetScout Systems, O2 Micro International, Proofpoint, Rambus, Sprint, UMC and Weatherford International.
* The appointments of Bryan Palma as president and COO of BlackBerry; and Robert Swan as CEO of Intel.
* The death of Pierre Nanterme, ex-chairman and CEO of Accenture.

South Africa:
* According to a South Africa-specific analysis conducted by Accenture, using the Accenture and World Economic Forum value-at-stake framework, digital technologies can generate more than R5 trillion in value for industry and society over the next decade through the use of technologies in key industry sectors, including agriculture, public infrastructure and administration, financial services and manufacturing.

EMEA/Africa:
* The EMEA traditional PC market (desktops, notebooks, and workstations) came in negative in Q418, with the market declining 5.8% year-on-year and totalling 19.6 million units, according to IDC.

Worldwide:
* Worldwide shipments of smartphone application processors are expected to fall for the second consecutive year in 2019, as the outlook for the segment was weakened by uncertainty over the lingering US-China trade dispute, concerns of possible shifts of production capacity and volatile foreign exchange rate, according to Digitimes Research.
* Worldwide IT spending is projected to total $3.76 trillion in 2019, an increase of 3.2% from 2018, according to Gartner. With the shift to cloud, a key driver of IT spending, enterprise software, will continue to exhibit strong growth, with worldwide software spending projected to grow 8.5% in 2019. It will grow another 8.2% in 2020 to total $466 billion.
* Smartphone vendors shipped a total of 375.4 million units during 4Q18, down 4.9% year-over-year and the fifth consecutive quarter of decline, according to IDC.
* The global smartphone production volume for 1Q19 will come to 307 million, showing a 10% year-on-year drop, according to TrendForce.

* JSE All share index: Down 0.2%
* FTSE100: Up 3.1%
* DAX: Down 0.9%
* NYSE (Dow): Up 1.3%
* S&P 500: Up 1.6%
* Nasdaq: Up 1.4%
* Nikkei225: Up 0.1%
* Hang Seng: Up 1.3%
* Shanghai: Up 0.6%

International:
* Altice France acquiring a majority stake in OTT TV operator Molotov, with ambitions to create "a Spotify of TV".

South Africa:
* Naspers and Dimension Data selling their joint venture in the country to fibre-optic infrastructure company Link Africa.

Corporate Knights has released its 2019 list of @The 100 most sustainable companies, which features from a technology perspective:

* 10: Taiwan Semiconductor
* 14: Cisco
* 17: Analog Devices
* 21: Ericsson
* 27: KPN
* 30: LG Electronics
* 38: Dassault Systems
* 39: HP
* 48: Autodesk
* 52: Alphabet
* 64: Nokia
* 81: Workday
* 87: Ansys
* 90: VMware
* 93: Accenture
* 94: Celestica
* 96: Konica Minolta
* 100: Panasonic