With around £1bn at its disposal, Quickline is fully funded on its mission to bring gigabit-capable infrastructure to deep rural communities and is on target to pass 120,000 premises by the end of the year.
Tue, 16/07/2024 - 15:55
A year on from the formal merger of Fern Trading’s FTTP assets, AllPoints Fibre Networks (APFN) Group CEO Jarlath Finnegan shares the four-focus strategy that drove integration success and may help altnet leaders as the sector remains on the brink of mass consolidation.
During 2023 Fern Trading took five entities, Cuckoo and four networks, and consolidated these into two companies. APFN is an open-access full fibre wholesale platform and ISP Cuckoo is its main anchor tenant, with its own management team, systems and processes. To pivot four distinct business plans into one unified strategy Finnegan adopted an approach to align ‘hearts, minds, systems and networks.’
The first two of these focuses, hearts and minds, overcome the cultural hurdles of mergers. “It’s not enough to tell people what’s happening and reassure them: you have to paint a positive vision of the future, and then keep telling that story over and over,” said Finnegan.
APFN’s vision is to enable ISPs, Virtual ISPs, resellers and MSPs to serve all addressable FTTP premises in the UK (forecasted to end up between 25 to 30 million) through its wholesale platform. Its short-term focus is on making Cuckoo successful in connecting millions of customers within the next five to seven years.
“When the formal merger happens, that’s just the start of your story, and then execution is key. The plan will evolve but the principles must remain fixed,” Finnegan added. “We had to think a lot about our operating model and the culture of the new company we were creating, and how we were going to bring it to life. Our culture building at APFN is great: it’s supportive and friendly but we recognise that people might still miss their old days at Swish, Jurassic or Giganet.”
To aid the process APFN has carried forward cultural points that will resonate with members of all previous businesses. An example of this is leading through sustainability, which is a key strategic pillar for the new organization. “We are building a business and network that will stand the test of time," said Finnegan.
“We view sustainability as a key enabler to evolving our business for the long term. We focus on sustainability through the lens of ESG; Health and Safety; the communities we are present in; business continuity and of course our supply chain. The people in our business love to feed into this and we feel our approach is the right balance for where we currently are on our journey.”
The later two focuses, systems and networks, talk to operational challenges and have proved a more technical but exciting challenge for APFN. Finnegan said: “Your readers won’t be surprised to hear that the hardest practical part is merging the different systems and networks! If you think about scale day one, then decision-making comes down to time and investment. We’re making good progress on this, and we are over the hardest parts, but it’s not finished yet. We are investing for the next 20 years so it’s worth taking the time and the correct level of investment to get it right.
“We have more work to do on refining our operational model to deliver our strategy as this process takes time and cannot be executed in one hit. To drive efficiency, you have to keep working at ways to become efficient and to understand what is not best served to be run internally and can be better served by our supply chain partners.”
Having undergone this process on a large scale has set APFN up for further M&A opportunities as the sector continues its consolidation. “Our platform will enable us to integrate networks efficiently and in a very short timeframe; we have already done this ourselves in the current merger so we will be open to opportunities as they arise.
“At the moment we don’t have anything to announce on acquisitions, but we’re keeping a close eye on the marketplace and have been building the foundations for us to act in a major way as the market consolidates."
Finnegan highlighted the inevitability of consolidation, in case any were still sceptical. “We expect the market to consolidate as the current set-up is not sustainable. We are seeing some deals taking place but no real pace as yet. Most firms are focused on customer take-up which is understandable. It will be interesting to see how the new government set out their vision for digital connectivity especially fibre to the home.’
