CityFibre needs additional funding to keep the pressure on Openreach 

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With existing funding set to run out in 2025, the company is working to find new sources of cash 

The UK’s largest altnet CityFibre has released its annual statement for the 2023 financial year this week, in which it warned that to continue operations as usual it will need to secure additional external funding. 

“As the Group and Company are reliant on securing further external funding which is not guaranteed, a material uncertainty exists which may cast significant doubt on the ability of the Group and Company to continue as a going concern and as a result they may be unable to realise this assets and discharge their liabilities in the normal course of business,” read the report.  

The altnet is currently privately owned by four companies: Antin Infrastructure Partners, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Mubadala Investment Company,city and Interogo Holding. 

As per the report, CityFibre stated that its current debt and equity funding will be fully utilised by mid-2025 and that it has hired external advisors Evercore to help find more debt funding.  

Despite these concerns, the company’s current financial health appeared to be strong, with revenue sitting at £99.67 million in 2023 (up from £30.97 million in 2022), having added 163,000 customers. Gross profit stood at £42.76m 

The company also provided its outlook on the wider market, which concluded that more altnet consolidation in the future is inevitable and argued that they represented the ideal ‘third infrastructure platform’ to challenge Openreach and Virgin Media O2. 

“Given the financial pressures on the market and specifically the challenges for smaller players to raise capital to support their growth, we believe that widespread consolidation of UK alt-nets is inevitable and that as the largest challenger to BT Openreach, we will play a leading role. The market needs a third infrastructure platform of scale to ensure competition remains healthy and delivers for UK consumers. CityFibre is the core of that third platform.” 

A CityFibre spokesperson confirmed that the company is midway though a “capital intensive phase” in its long term investment plan, but nonetheless described 2024 as being a turning point for the company’s profitability. 

“2024 is proving to be a significant year for CityFibre: we are EBITDA positive, we’ve secured a long-term partnership with Sky and we’re a trusted partner of Government, which has awarded us £800m to connect rural communities to full fibre broadband as part of Project Gigabit,” said the statement. 

Keep up to date with the latest international telecoms news by subscribing to the Total Telecom daily newsletter 

Also in the news:
AltNets’ path to success for FTTx Build Acceptance in Openreach PIA
T-Mobile hit with yet another fine over data breaches
“We were into AI before it was cool!”: Chatting AI and telco trust with Juniper’s Neil McRae 



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