Vantiv swipes Worldpay

The Vantiv/Worldpay deal dominated the international ICT market last week. At home, it was very quiet.

* A full-year loss from the PBT Group (ignoring the effects of the Stella Partners deal), although revenue up 12.8%.
* Datatec's subsidiary Logicalis Group acquired a 51% stake in NubeliU, a South America-based company specialising in cloud computing projects based on OpenStack.
* Cognition bought the remaining 37% of the shares in BMi Sport Info it does not already own.
* ICASA has placed its CEO, Pakamile Pongwana, on "precautionary suspension", with COO Willington Ngwepe acting as CEO until such time as internal processes have been concluded.

* The Zambian government has set 1 October as the date for a complete switchover to digital broadcasting from analogue television services along the rail line.
* The appointments of Joseph Nnanna as chairman of Etisalat Nigeria; Boye Olusanya, former CEO of Econet Wireless as acting CEO and MD of Etisalat Nigeria; and Godfrey Sserwamukoko as MD of iWayAfrica Uganda.
* The resignations of Hakeem Belo-Osagie, chairman of Etisalat Nigeria; and Matthew Willsher, CEO of Etisalat Nigeria.

Look out for the possible merger of Snapdeal and Flipkart.

* ABB, a global leader in communication networks for utility customers, acquired the mission-critical communications network division of the Keymile Group, in a move designed to strengthen the company's digital grid portfolio and software focus.
* Adva Optical Networking bought MRV Communications, a company which specialises in network equipment for data centres, for $69 million.
* Baidu purchased US-based start-up Kitt.ai, the maker of a conversational language engine called ChatFlow and a customisable "hotword" detection platform named Snowboy. The platforms are deployed in devices such as smartphone apps, speakers, appliances and chat bots.
* Datamatics Global Services (India) acquired a controlling stake in TechJini (India), a boutique mobile and Web application development company.
* DXC Technology, an independent, end-to-end IT services company, bought Tribridge, one of the largest independent integrators of Microsoft Dynamics 365.
* StarHub, a Singaporean telecoms firm, purchased 49% of cyber security services provider Accel Systems for $18.9 million, which will see the latter become a StarHub subsidiary.
* Symantec acquired Fireglass, an Israeli cyber security start-up.
* Vantiv, a US credit card processing firm, bought Worldpay, the UK's largest payment processing firm, for £7.7 billion.
* Qualcomm will ask the US International Trade Commission to bar Apple from selling some iPhones and iPads in the US that use chips made by Intel on the grounds that the devices infringe on six Qualcomm patents.
* Argentina's Telecom Argentina SA and cable TV provider Cablevisi'on SA have reached a merger agreement enabling them to offer so-called quadruple play services, a result of that country's telecoms sector reforms.
* The Asia-Africa-Europe-1 (AAE-1) undersea cable, the largest global submarine cable system, is now ready for use. AAE-1 is the first next-generation cable system to link all major Asian, African, Middle Eastern and European nations via the lowest latency subsea route.
* Canon may be fined as much as 10% of annual revenue (about $2.9 billion) for jumping the gun in its acquisition of Toshiba's medical unit.
* Jawbone, the 18-year-old technology company that was once valued at more than $3 billion, has gone into liquidation.
* Nokia and Xiaomi Technology have signed a patent licensing agreement, which includes a cross-licence to each company's cellular standard patents. In addition, Nokia will provide network infrastructure equipment to Xiaomi.
* Good year-end numbers from Imagination Technologies (back in the black).
* The appointments of Carl Leaver as chairman of Eircom; and David Rowe as chairman of Blur Group.
* The departure of Leif Johansson, chairman of Ericsson (at or before the next AGM).
* A possible IPO in Switzerland by the end of September from Toshiba's energy metering company Landis+Gyr.
* A planned IPO in Poland from Play Communications, the owner of Poland's second biggest mobile network operator, Play. The flotation would be the biggest in Warsaw since 2011.
* An IPO filing in Hong Kong from China Literature, a Tencent Holdings unit and the country's largest online publishing and e-book company.
* An IPO filing in Hong Kong from Razer, a Singapore-founded gaming hardware design firm.

Worldwide:
* Worldwide shipments of PCs, tablets and smartphones are expected to exceed 2.3 billion units in 2017, a decline of 0.3% from 2016, according to Gartner.
* Total spending on IT infrastructure products (server, enterprise storage and Ethernet switches) for deployment in cloud environments will increase 12.4% year-on-year in 2017, to $40.1 billion, according to IDC. Public cloud data centres will account for the majority of this spending (60.7%) and will grow at the fastest rate year-on-year (13.8%). Off-premises private cloud environments will represent 14.9% of overall spending and will grow 11.9% year-on-year. On-premises private clouds will account for 62.2% of spending on private cloud IT infrastructure and will grow 9.6% year on year in 2017.

* JSE All share index: Up 0.6%
* FTSE100: Up 0.5%
* DAX: Up 0.3%
* NYSE (Dow): Up 0.3%
* S&P 500: Up 0.1%
* Nasdaq: Up 0.2%
* Nikkei225: Down 0.5%
* Hang Seng: Down 1.6%
* Shanghai: Up 0.8%

International:
* The possible merger of Snapdeal and Flipkart.

Africa:
* A buyer for Etisalat Nigeria, with Orange Telecom and Vodafone as frontrunners to buy a 65% stake in the operator.

South Africa:
* A possible sell-off by NTT of Dimension Data.

The following is some further analysis of the recently published American Fortune 500.

Newcomers and returnees:
* Activision Blizzard at number 406 (was number 532)
* Adobe at 443 (was 524)
* American Tower at 449 (was 526)
* Dell Technologies at 41 (a returnee; it went private and now includes its EMC acquisition)
* Harris at 363 (a returnee; it was 505 last year)
* HPE at 59 (this follows the split of HP)
* Liberty Media at 491 (was 525)
* Nvidia at 387 (was 508)
* Yahoo at 498 (a returnee; it was 513 last year)

Displacements:
* Broadcom, acquired by Avago Technologies and now Singapore-based
* Cablevision Systems, acquired by Altice
* EMC, acquired by Dell
* Ingram Micro, acquired by Tianjin Tianhai
* Sandisk, acquired by Western Digital
* Telephone & Data Systems (now 504)
* Time Warner Cable, acquired by Charter Communications
* Visteon (now 693)

Biggest movers (excludes any of the above):
* Amphenol at 424 (was 462)
* Computer Sciences at 379 (was 233)
* Facebook at 98 (was 157)
* Frontier Communications at 313 (was 461)
* HP at 61 (was 20, but has now split into two companies)
* Lam Research at 440 (was 491)
* Micron Technology at 226 (was 173)
* NetApp at 468 (was 422)
* Netflix at 314 (was 379)
* PayPal Holdings at 264 (was 307)
* Salesforce.com at 326 (was 386)
* Symantec at 465 (was 400)
* Winstream Holdings at 485 (was 443)