After a great Tour de France with one stage win (Steve Cummings on the stage 14), African mobile communications brand MTN has announced that it will strop its sponsorship for the next season. New sponsor Dimension Data, who is also a technical and data sponsor of the Tour de France, is likely to step up as a new title sponsor but a formal announcement has yet to be made.

"It was a big deal to us to end our engagement with Qhubeka because it represented to us not just a South African brand‚ but it also represented to us a Pan African brand. Businesses have to make tough decisions around where and how they support partners", company’s group corporate affairs executive Chris Maroleng explained to Times Media. "We feel we don’t have a return on that investment at the levels of comfort to us."