Community Fibre's strong Q3 shows revenue growth to £41.7m

Community Fibre’s latest Q3 annual financial report shows a strong year with a growth in revenue by 109% to £41.7m at the end of 2023.

This was due to an increase in connected customers, enabled by the expansion of the network and premises passed.

However, these gains are still being overshadowed by a larger surge in losses to £134.6m, compared to just half of £50.4m in the previous year.

2023 was a difficult year for the network operator and ISP provider, which is currently being backed by a finance facility of £985m, due to the rising cost of build, strong market competition and high interest rates.

This was reflected by their previous slowdown in network build and related redundancies during 2023, which resulted in the company focussing more on growing customer uptake.

The latest company accounts to the end of December 2023 confirm that they expected to “reach a peak network size in excess of 1.3 million residential premises and 0.2 million business premises primarily within Greater London during the first half of 2024” (fibre coverage), which was largely achieved.

The group has continued investment in network roll-out, with the report showing £225.3m of additional property, plant and equipment.

The results add that the “group’s core business challenge is [now] to connect customers quickly enough, with low enough customer acquisition and connect costs and tightly controlled network maintenance and other overheads to ensure sufficient economic returns on its assets.”