CommScope gazumps Vecima for Casa’s cable business

The sale of its cable business to CommScope for $45.1 million marks the closing chapter in the Casa Systems fire sale saga. When Casa announced that it had all gone horribly wrong a couple of months ago, Vecima Networks was revealed as the stalking horse bidder for its cable business, which set the lowest selling price at $20 million.

But other parties were still free to bid on that business and CommScope knew a bargain when it saw one. An auction process then commenced, in which Vecima had apparently decided its ceiling was $45 million. For some reason, Vecima chose to effectively confirm this by announcing it is now the ‘back-up bidder’ – i.e. loser of the auction – with a bid of $44.95 million. This only becomes relevant if the U.S. Bankruptcy Court block’s CommScope’s bid, a decision that is expected to be made this week.

“As a leader in the cable industry, we are quite pleased by the opportunity to acquire Casa’s cloud-native network solutions,” said CommScope CEO Chuck Treadway. “Adding Casa’s technology to our portfolio will allow us to provide a seamless transition for our combined customer base that utilize both integrated and virtual CMTS products. This transaction provides stability to Casa’s customers while allowing CommScope to further grow our customer base as we enable customers to migrate to Distributed Access Architecture solutions on their own timeline.”

A strangely nuanced opening from Chuck there. Normally, especially in the US, you expect effusive, jubilant verbs such as delighted or excited. Maybe he has a bit of buyers remorse and, in hindsight, fears he might have got a bit carried away during the auction. Either that or he has been watching too many English period dramas and has been won over by our love of under-statement.

Vecima’s announcement also reveals that the auction all took place on one day and that there were several interested parties. “Irrespective of the outcome of the auction, Vecima remains firmly positioned to drive the industry forward to the multi-gigabit networks of the future across both fiber and cable access,” said Sumit Kumar, Vecima President and CEO. Sure thing, Sumit, we never doubted it mate.

So Casa’s cable business is, presumably, going to CommScope, its 5G stuff has already been acquired by Lumine Group and it managed to get a few million out of DZS for its NetComm broadband access subsidiary. On the whole this is a sad end for a telecoms company that was once valued at over $1 billion. With the telecoms recession showing little sign of letting up in the short term, we wouldn’t be surprised to be reporting on more stories like this.