Carrier Access axes management, seeks buyer

Carrier Access has replaced two co-founders on its management team--including its chief executive officer--both of whom will focus now on exploring “strategic alternatives” for the company as its revenue continues to dwindle.

Chairman Roger Koenig will resign his CEO post today, replaced by Allen Snyder, who joined the company last fall as its chief operating officer. Nancy Pierce, the company’s corporate development officer and Koenig’s wife, will also resign; but, like Koenig, she will retain her role as a director. A few weeks ago, the two volunteered to decline their salaries after announcing that second-quarter results would fall short of expectations.

Analysts at Think Equity Partners believe the company could be acquired as soon as within a month. Tellabs may be the most logical buyer of the company, they wrote in a note this morning, because its 5500 crossconnect platform, which has been employed in wireless backhaul applications, has been integrated with Carrier Access software. Other potential buyers include Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei Technologies, Motorola, Alcatel and Samsung.

Think Equity imagines the company could be acquired for about $210 million (or $6 per share), including its $88 million in cash. Analysts there expect the company, were it to continue as a stand-alone entity, to report losses of $35 million (or $1.04 per share) this year and $17 million (or $0.45 per share) in 2008.

Carrier Access has been struggling with declining revenue and cost-cutting since last year, complaining of a drop in spending among wireless carrier customers. The company has also been working to diversify its customer base (more than a third of its revenue last year came from one customer: Cingular Wireless). In March it acquired multiservice switch vendor Mangrove Systems for $8 million.

The company’s second-quarter revenue was down 69% from a year earlier to $7.7 million. It expects third-quarter revenue to be sequentially flat.

“Clearly, [Carrier Access] has been operating in a strong market, but its technology has not been the right one over the last 12 months,” Think Equity analysts wrote in a research note this morning. “Business all around is terrible, and there is little worth of any hopeful explanation as to why this is going on while the rest of the wireless companies are doing so well. Most peer group companies have shown good growth over the last year.”

According to Koenig, the company’s troubles come more from timing than execution, as it has sold 40,000 units in North America. “I look at it more as a wave-and-trough situation,” he said in response to an analyst question in a conference call Tuesday evening. “We were between the initial buildouts and leveraging the services that take advantage of this technology, both in the wireline voice-over-IP business and in wireless.”

Carrier Access started life in 1992 as a systems integration and consulting business. Three years later, it began selling products.