LUXEMBOURG (dpa-AFX) - Surprising change in leadership at software provider Suse: CEO Melissa Di Donato is stepping down from her post, the SDax company announced Tuesday after the close of the stock market. Under her leadership, the company had gone public, but the success story failed to materialize. Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen is to take over the business in the future. On Wednesday, investors reacted to the news in a huff: Suse shares were almost 1.4 percent lower at 16.69 euros.

The new Suse chief van Leeuwen had been employed by rival company Red Hat and is scheduled to start on May 1. In the meantime, Chief Financial Officer Andy Myers is to lead the group, he said. Van Leeuwen looks back on many years of experience in the software industry, according to the company. He has held several positions since starting at open source software provider Red Hat in 2004, he said. Joining Suse feels like the "next logical step" in his career, the manager shared in a post on career platform Linkedin. By his own account, he has supported so-called open source software, i.e. data applications with freely available source code, for more than 30 years.

To explain Di Donato's departure, Suse said only that the manager would begin a new chapter in her career. Under her leadership, the company had gone public on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in mid-May 2021, but the still rather young stock market history was not crowned with success: Since the initial listing with an offer price of 30 euros, the Suse share has lost about 45 percent in value. Since one year alone, the minus is about 38 percent.

However, Suse had performed better than expected in the first quarter of this year in the day-to-day business. The Linux specialist, which has its operational headquarters in Nuremberg, even made a profit below the line.

Suse does its business primarily with customized versions of the Linux open source operating system in companies and data centers. Among other things, the company earns through supporting the applications. The newer, so-called emerging division deals primarily with technologies around cloud applications, for which Suse had acquired the company Rancher./ngu/lew/stk