Since Casa Systems announced on Tuesday, March 14, 2023, that Jerry Guo was retiring as CEO and President effective March 17, 2023 – yes, that's three days later – it's stock has taken a sharp dive.
A search is on to find his replacement but in the meanwhile, Edward Durkin, CFO, will serve as Interim CEO "until the Company’s new CEO is hired, with advisory assistance to be received from Jerry, and with functional support across all other disciplines from the Casa senior management team."
According to the company announcement, Guo, who founded Casa Systems, will remain as an active member of Casa's board of directors. Guo founded the company in 2003 and drove its technology vision and growth mainly in the cable sector.
"As announced this week, Jerry decided to retire from Casa after founding the Company over 20 years ago in 2003, traveling extensively and tirelessly building the Company to be a global leading provider of cloud-native software and broadband infrastructure solutions for the past two decades. Jerry will remain a large shareholder and active Board member, and we will be working together closely to enable a seamless transition," Durkin told Silverlinings via email.
"Our plan going forward is we will remain focused on our core values of delivering innovative solutions to market for the benefit of our marquee global customers. We will have a laser focus on renewed top line growth and profitability across our Cable, Cloud, Access Device and RAN product lines, while also thoughtfully considering the needs of our employees, customers, investors, and other key stakeholders, with a continued unrelenting commitment to excellence and market leadership," he added.
"[Gou] is originally a cable guy ... and [Casa] started as a CMTS and CCAP vendor and they did well," Jeff Heynen, VP for broadband access and home networking research, Dell'Oro, told Silverlinings. "Then they announced that this tier one customer would not be moving forward with them as part of their network upgrade. And I think that's very clearly Charter. And so I think those two things, those two announcements kind of go hand in hand."
Gou's retirement "cements Casa's transition to more of a wireless mobile core type play," said Heynen. "And I think my guess is that they're likely going to find somebody who has experience in dealing with mobile operators."
"The transition has a lot to do with the fact that they didn't move forward with a virtual CMTS as quickly as Harmonic," said Heynen. "They do have one now and it's being tested at some pretty significant operators."
On a positive note, Heynen added, "They've got this investment from Verizon to develop mobile core products and they've got smart engineers there. They've got smart folks. And that's where the growth is going to come from for them."
Guo's leaving follows the company's announcement in mid-December that its Co-Founder and Senior Vice President of Operations Lucy Xie was leaving to attend to family parental issues.
This article was updated with a quote from Casa Systems on March 16, 2023, at 2:41pm EST.