Carrier Access exposes Mangrove’s roots

Equipment vendor Carrier Access revealed new details last week surrounding Mangrove Systems, the company it acquired for $8 million in March. Mangrove had slightly more than $3 million in total assets at the end of last year—less than half their value a year earlier.

Between its inception in March 2002 and the end of last year, Mangrove raised about $48 million in equity financing and $14 million in debt financing, collected nearly $1.1 million in revenue and accrued a deficit of about $52 million. But until this year, the company was growing revenue and cutting its losses. In 2006, Mangrove grew its net sales nearly 20% to $476,000 and cut its net loss roughly in half, to less than $9.6 million.

Mangrove sold multiprotocol label-switching gear that used generic framing procedure, link capacity adjustment scheme and virtual concatenation techniques as well as pseudowire emulation technology to route a variety of legacy and packet-based traffic such as ATM and Ethernet. Mangrove’s Piranha 100 and 600 products will become CA’s EdgeFlex 100 and 600.

At least initially, the acquisition of Mangrove adds to Carrier Access’ losses without helping its top line. Having ceased operations earlier this year, Mangrove collected no revenue in the first quarter of this year. But its addition would widen Carrier Access’ pro-forma net loss for the first quarter by nearly 13% to nearly $11 million.

Carrier Access is hoping Mangrove’s gear will generate sales in overseas markets in particular and help the company diversify its highly concentrated customer base. The company is struggling to rebound from spending declines among the wireless carriers that are its biggest customers. A month after announcing the Mangrove acquisition, Carrier Access announced a restructuring effort meant to cut costs by down-sizing remote development centers and eliminating some contractors. The company is also hiring about 30 former Mangrove employees.