Author: Elan

Global smartphone shipments are expected to decline by 15% in 2026 as increasing memory prices driven by AI technology push up device costs, according to research firm CCS Insight.Some entry-level phones have seen their prices rise by over 50% since last year. The primary smartphone market shrank by 4.4% in the first quarter of 2026, despite carriers stockpiling inventory, indicating further declines are likely for the rest of the year.Meanwhile, the used phone market is projected to grow by 15%, as consumers increasingly turn to pre-owned devices to avoid higher prices on new models.What’s Driving Smartphone Price Increases in 2026The…

foot in mouth Democratic Alliance leader Geordin Hill-Lewis’s letter to South African President Cyril Ramaphosa asking for a wide-ranging cabinet reshuffle has been met with resistance from the African National Congress. By Carien du Plessis in Johannesburg South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa at Tuynhuys in Cape Town, 13 March 2025. © Rodger Bosch/AFP Published on June 18, 2026 at 16:53 pm (GMT +1) The request from the Democratic Alliance (DA) that South Africa’s agriculture minister John Steenhuisen be moved to the position of deputy minister of trade, industry and competition comes days after his long-running row with farmers’ organisations over his…

Africa’s new trade and investment paradigm: Reality or rhetoric? – African Business Africa’s new trade and investment paradigm: Reality or rhetoric? – African Business

In brief Trace Finance raised a $32 million Series A round led by CoinFund, with backing from Coinbase Ventures, Haun Ventures, and more. The funding comes as Brazil reclassifies cross-border crypto flows as foreign-exchange operations, pushing institutional volume toward bank-grade providers like Trace. The company plans to use the funds to expand beyond its U.S.-Brazil corridor into other Latin American markets, the U.S., and Asia-Pacific. Trace Finance, a financial infrastructure company that links banks in Brazil and the United States to stablecoin settlement networks, said Wednesday that it has raised $32 million in a Series A funding round led by…

This article is based on a conversation from Voices & Visions, a podcast produced through a partnership between Tutto Passa Agency and TechCabal, which explores the people and ideas shaping Africa’s innovation economy. The world’s biggest climate challenge at the moment may not be raising more money, but deploying the existing capital differently.  In Africa, investors have committed $44 billion annually, up nearly 50% from a few years ago, yet founders building technologies to help farmers survive droughts, businesses reduce emissions, and communities adapt to changing weather patterns still struggle to access capital.  According to Victor Ndiege, the CEO of…

Imagine you need to extract a simple number from a complex string, such as a product code with region-specific abbreviations or a column of phone numbers stored in four different formats. To make matters worse, because the data came from an external source, it might also contain trailing spaces, inconsistent formatting, or other small errors. To handle these problems, you could build a formula using MID and FIND, rely on Flash Fill to guess what you want, use Excel’s Find and Replace tool, or bring out the heavy hitters like Power Query or VBA UDFs (user-defined functions). While all of…

Mezzanine and Open Access Energy (OAE) have entered into a formal reseller agreement, bringing together two technology-driven businesses committed to advancing South Africa’s liberalising electricity market. Under the agreement, OAE will market, sell, and operate Mezzanine’s Virtual Wheeling Platform as part of its Energypro platform offering. The partnership enables corporate energy buyers, independent power producers, and traders to access virtual wheeling infrastructure through a single, integrated experience. Understanding wheeling — and why virtual wheeling matters Wheeling is the mechanism that allows a renewable energy generator to sell electricity to a buyer located elsewhere on the national grid, using the existing…

Musonda Chipalo, CEO of GIP Zambia** For the best experience, download the free Africa Private Equity News app Android | iOS **Growth Investment Partners (GIP) Zambia has made its fourth investment, committing ZMW 50 million (about $2.8 million) to Altus Financial Services.Altus provides public sector employees and micro-entrepreneurs with access to credit within 24 hours of a completed application.“Through this facility, we aim to support Altus in expanding its loan book, deepening its footprint, and reaching more underserved borrowers, particularly those often overlooked by conventional lenders,” the firm said in a statement.Musonda Chipalo, CEO of GIP Zambia, noted the partnership…

Editor’s note: This article is the second in a three-part series on the state of venture investment to Black-founded startups in 2026. Driving these reports is data from Crunchbase’s Diversity Spotlight feature, which offers insight into diversity in startups’ and investment firms’ leadership teams. Read Part 1, exploring the data on funding to Black founders, here. Part 3 will be published next week. Only around $942 million — or just 0.32% of total U.S. venture funding — went to startups with a Black founder or co-founder last year, per Crunchbase data. That’s one of the lowest shares in years, and…

SpaceX’s first week as a public company is starting to look less like a conventional stock-market debut and more like a high-leverage crypto asset.Shares of Elon Musk-led company, trading under the ticker SPCX, extended their post-IPO rally Tuesday as investors piled into one of the smallest public floats ever attached to a company valued in the trillions of dollars.The stock rose as much as 13% to $210 in early market trading, according to Yahoo Finance data.This frenzy has also crossed into digital-asset markets, where SPCX-linked perpetual futures have become one of the busiest contracts across crypto trading platforms.Tiny float turns…