Hey Silverliners!
It’s a fresh, shiny new year! So what better time to look at companies that may not make it through 2024 — at least in their current form.
We've pulled together a shortlist of businesses that are in the danger zone in 2024 — if you are a Star Trek fan, we are calling these companies the "Red Shirts" of the tech world if you will.
Casa Systems
Casa Systems supplies 5G equipment for the radio access network (RAN) and core as well as other telecom equipment. The vendor's major customer is Verizon.
The firm didn’t have a great 2023. For instance in Q3, it reported a GAAP net loss of 25.6 million for the quarter. 2024 doesn’t look much better as Casa just extended its credit agreement on Jan. 2, 2024.
X (the company formerly know as Twitter)
Billionaire blowhard Elon Musk struck a deal to buy social media company Twitter in April 2022. Since then he has laid off more than 6,000 Twitter employees, or 80% of the company’s staff, changed the company’s name to X, and cut cloud costs by a reported 60% by moving a large amount of workload back on-premises.
Along the way, Musk has really ticked off X’s advertisers, many of whom are refusing to advertise on the platform due to the rise in hate speech on X. The company may have lost up to $75 million in ad revenue by the end of 2023, according to the New York Times.
Musk himself has raised the possibility of X going bankrupt. Of course, it is the creditors that are on the hook for $44 billion acquisition costs that will have the final say on that.
Dish Network
Charlie Ergen’s wireless journey just got a lot more solid. After the financial roller coaster of 2023, Dish completed its merger with Echostar yesterday, which will give the greenfield operator a lot more time and money to play the 5G game.
That doesn’t mean that matters will grow stable at Dish. Chairman Ergen and his team at Dish are trying to become a fully-fledged 5G wireless operator and move away from their slowly fading pay-TV roots.
So expect more changes from Dish over 2024.
Nokia
Nokia is now officially the sick man of the 5G scene.
2023 seemed to start on an upbeat note as the Finnish firm launched a major B2B re-brand at Mobile World Congress. By October, however, the firm announced that it planned to cut up to 14,000 jobs worldwide by 2026, thanks to a global drop in network sales in 2023.
Ericsson capped off a terrible year for its Scandinavian rival by nabbing a $14 billion RAN contract from AT&T that was previously held by Nokia. This meant that Nokia is now a minority provider for all the big U.S. operators. The firm has already said that it would not achieve its 2023 financial outlook thanks to this. Expect to see a very different Nokia exit 2024.
In the meanwhile, we'll be watching to see what happens with these four.