Broadcom makes bid for Qualcomm

The $100 billion+ Broadcom/Qualcomm proposal dominated the international ICT market last week.

At home, the announcement of the winners of the IT Personality of the Year 2017 and Visionary CIO 2017 were the local highlights.

* Mediocre Q1 numbers from Net1, with revenue down 2% and profit down 20.9%.
* Mediocre interim numbers from Telkom SA, with revenue down 0.6% and profit down 5.7%.
* Convergence Partners and 4Di Group made a minority investment in ESET Southern Africa, the local distributor and brand operator for global Internet and endpoint security software vendor ESET.
* Knife Capital, a South African venture capital firm, has made its first European investment by way of a R22 million funding round for Swedish start-up, Mobile and Sensory Technology, a company that focuses on innovations that can be applied to the rapidly expanding exploding Internet of things sector.
* South African start-up Vigitech has announced the availability of Tinitell, a wearable mobile phone and GPS tracker for kids.
* Shashi Hansjee, CEO of Entelect, has been named as IITPSA's 2017 IT Personality of the Year; and Alec Joannou, global CIO of Sasol, was named Visionary CIO 2017. In addition, The Institute of Information Technology Professionals South Africa, in partnership with EngineerIT, has presented its Distinguished Service in ICT award to professor Pete Janse van Vuuren, director of The Thinking Cap, recognising his "significant, career-length contribution to the ICT industry".

* Veon, the former VimpelCom, has applied to Egyptian authorities to buy another 42.31% of the former Orascom Telecom for the equivalent of $894 million, in a move that would raise its stake to over 94%.

Look out for further news regarding government's broadband plans.

* Apple acquired image sensor company InVisage.
* AXISCADES, a product engineering solutions firm, bought India-based specialised embedded technology company Mistral Solutions for $27 million.
* Barracuda Networks purchased Sonian, a provider of public cloud archiving and business insights.
* BCE acquired AlarmForce Industries, a Canadian provider of home security and monitoring services for $166 million.
* Brookfield Infrastructure bought Reliance Communications' mobile tower business for $200 million.
* Bytedance, a Chinese online content platform, purchased popular lip-sync platform Musical.ly for $1 billion, in a deal that underlines the global ambitions of the fast-growing tech start-up.
* EA acquired Respawn Entertainment, an independent game development studio.
* Symantec bought SurfEasy, a virtual private network provider that delivers easy-to-use solutions for online privacy and security on smartphones, tablets and computers.
* Talend purchased Restlet SAS, a cloud-based API design and testing platform.
* USA Technologies acquired Cantaloupe Systems, a premier provider of cloud and mobile solutions for vending, micro markets and office coffee services. The deal was worth $85 million.
* Veecon Media & Television bought Reliance Big TV, the DTH unit of the Anil Ambani-owned company.
* Bharti Telecom made an additional investment in Bharti Airtel, the former now owning 50.1%.
* Tencent Holdings made a 12% investment in Snap.
* A strategic partnership was established between Accenture and Vlocity, an industry cloud company that delivers omnichannel and industry-specific cloud and mobile solutions on the Salesforce Customer Success Platform.
* The US Supreme Court has refused to step back into the years-long feud over patents between the world's top smartphone makers, declining to hear Samsung's appeal of a lower court ruling that reinstated a jury award of about $120 million in favour of Apple.
* Corephotonics, an Israeli start-up, has sued Apple, accusing the iPhone maker of copying its patented smartphone camera technology.
* Broadcom has made an unsolicited $130 billion bid for Qualcomm, setting the stage for a major takeover battle, as the chipmaker looks to dominate the fast-growing market for semiconductors used in mobile phones. However, the proposal is reliant on Qualcomm completing its $38 billion takeover of NXP, which has yet to close.
* PayPal Holdings said TIO Networks, a publicly traded company PayPal acquired in July 2017, has suspended operations to protect TIO's customers.
* Excellent quarterly results from Coherent, DXC Technology, Extreme Networks (back in the black), GIS and Weibo.
* Very good quarterly figures from Alarm.com, Information Services Group, Mitek Systems, Nvidia, On Semiconductor, Quantenna Communications, Radcom, Zayo Group and Zynga (back in the black).
* Good quarterly numbers from AAC Technologies, Acer, Applied Optoelectronics, Brooks Automation, Cable One, Camtek, GoDaddy, IIJ, Microchip Technology, PC-Tel, Skyworks Solutions, TeleTech, Tetra Technologies (back in the black), Trend Micro and Xplore Technologies (back in the black).
* Satisfactory quarterly results from Alpha and Omega Semiconductor, Amdocs, Chicony Electronics, Compal, Diodes, Ebix, Genpact, Global Payments, Inmarsat, Insight Enterprises, Microsemi, Perceptron (back in the black), Presidio, RadNet, Sykes Enterprises, Telus, Tetra Tech, TowerJazz, Ubiquiti Networks and Vonage.
* Mediocre quarterly results from Ceragon Networks, CenturyLink, ChipMOS Technologies, Convergys, Dish Network, Himax Technologies, Intex Technologies, Pegatron and ScanSource.
* Mixed quarterly figures from Airgain, with revenue up but profit down; Alaska Communications, with revenue up but profit down; CGI Group, with revenue up but profit down; CSRA, with revenue up but profit down; EchoStar, with revenue up but profit down; Equifax, with revenue up but profit down; Fabrinet, with revenue up but profit down; Sapiens, with revenue up but profit down; Sina, with revenue up but profit down; TIM, with revenue up but profit down; Web.com, with revenue down but profit up; and Wind Tre, with revenue down but profit up.
* Very poor quarterly figures from Avid Technology.
* Quarterly losses from Adesto Technologies, Allot Communications, Alteryx, BroadSoft, Cogint, CSI Compresso, eGain, eMagin, Envestnet, Everbridge, GDS, Harte-Hanks, HTC, ID Systems, Identiv, Imperva, Infinera, Lattice Semiconductor, Lumos Networks, MaxLinear, Maxwell Technologies, Mimecast, NeoPhotonics, NII Holdings, Pegasystems, Pixelworks, Quantum, QuickLogic, RadiSys, Rapid7, Roku, Silver Spring Networks, Snap, Square, Superconductor Technologies, Synaptics, Take-Two Interactive Software, Talend, TDS, Tesaro, Toshiba, Twilio, Upland Software, US Cellular, USA Technologies, Veritone, ViaSat, Windstream, Wix.com, Xperi and Zebra Technologies.
* A half-year loss from Sophos.
* The appointments of Patrick Drahi as president of Altice (ex-CEO and founder); Dexter Goei as CEO of Altice; and John Shlonsky as CEO of West.
* The resignation of Michel Combes, CEO of Altice.
* An excellent IPO in Hong Kong by China Literature, Tencent's online publishing arm.
* A satisfactory IPO on Nasdaq by Bandwidth, a company that provides software APIs with voice and text functionality to enterprises.
* A good IPO on the NYSE by Sogou, the Chinese search engine backed by Tencent Holdings.

EMEA/Africa:
* IT spending in EMEA is projected to total $1 trillion in 2018, an increase of 4.9% from estimated spending of $974 billion in 2017.
* Mobile broadband connections across Africa will rise from 419 million at the end of this year to 1.07 billion by the end of 2022, according to Ovum.

Worldwide:
* Global smartphone shipments reached 375.9 million units in the third quarter of 2017, up 5.9% from a year earlier, according to Canalys.
* Global server shipments are estimated to surge 7.1% to 12.65 million units in 2017, and post a higher growth of 8.5% in 2018, mainly due to expanding demand for data centre servers and significant growth momentum expected in the Chinese market, according to Digitimes Research.
* The worldwide public cloud services market grew 28.6% year-over-year in 1H17, with revenue totalling $63.2 billion, according to IDC.
* The global smartphone market grew by 6.4% in Q317 to 367 million units, up from 345 million units in the year-ago quarter, according to IHS Markit.

* JSE All share index: Up 0.2% (highest weekend close)
* FTSE100: Down 1.7%
* DAX: Down 2.6% (although all-time high reached during the week)
* NYSE (Dow): Down 0.5% (although all-time high reached during the week)
* S&P 500: Down 0.2% (although all-time high reached during the week)
* Nasdaq: Down 0.2% (although all-time high reached during the week)
* Nikkei225: Up 0.6% (highest level reached during the week since 1992)
* Hang Seng: Up 1.8% (highest 2017 weekend close)
* Shanghai: Up 1.8% (highest 2017 weekend close)

International:
* Avast Software filing for an IPO.
* China Telecom investing $6 billion to acquire a controlling stake in Oi, the Brazilian telco.

South Africa:
* Further news regarding government's broadband plans.

IDC recently published its top 10 worldwide IT industry predictions. They are:

* By 2021, at least 50% of global GDP will be digitised, with growth in every industry driven by digitally enhanced offerings, operations and relationships.
* By 2020, 60% of all enterprises will be in the process of implementing a new IT foundation as part of a fully articulated organisation-wide DX platform strategy. IDC defines this new DX platform as the future enterprise IT architecture that will enable the rapid creation of digital products, services and experiences, while at the same time aggressively modernising the internal "intelligent core".
* By 2021, enterprise spending on cloud services and infrastructure will be more than $530 billion, and over 90% of enterprises will use multiple cloud services and platforms.
* By 2019, 40% of digital transformation initiatives will use AI services; by 2021, 75% of commercial enterprise apps will use AI.
* By 2021, enterprise apps will shift towards hyper-agile architectures, with 90% of applications on cloud platforms using micro services and cloud functions, and over 95% of new micro services deployed in containers.
* By 2020, human-digital interfaces will diversify, with 25% of field-service technicians and information workers using augmented reality, and nearly 50% of new mobile apps using voice as the primary interface.
* By 2021, at least 25% of the Global 2000 will use blockchain services as a foundation for digital trust at scale.
* By 2020, 90% of large enterprises will generate revenue from data as a service.
* Improvements in simple (low-code/no-code) development tools will dramatically expand the number of non-tech developers over the next 36 months.
* By 2021, more than half of the Global 2000 will see an average of one-third of their digital services interactions come through their open API ecosystems, up from virtually 0% in 2017.