LONDON (Reuters) – British fibre broadband company CityFibre said on Wednesday it recorded positive core earnings in its first quarter, ahead of its target of reaching the milestone in the first half, after it grew its customer connections by 77% to more than 400,000.
The company, which serves more than 40 internet service providers and mobile phone companies including TalkTalk, three and Vodafone, said it was regularly installing over 1,000 new customers a day.
Chief Executive Greg Mesch said the company, which last year reported 100 million pounds of revenue, was ahead of track in the three months to end-March.
“We were better on our cost control because we did all the work last year, but also our growth has been greater than we thought,” he said.
“A steady 1,000 installs a day and that’s 25,000 net additions per month.”
CityFibre, whose backers include Antin Infrastructure Partners and Goldman Sachs, agreed to buy Lit Fibre from Newlight Partners last month, accelerating its roll-out by up to 300,000 premises towards its eventual target of 8 million.
Mesch said more deals were in the pipeline, helping increase its footprint to challenge BT’s Openreach and Virgin Media O2’s networks. He is aiming to do one deal or so a quarter for the next eight quarters.
“That would be somewhere in the neighbourhood of six to eights deals,” he said. “We have conversations going with almost all the alt-nets.”
“All being small islands is not going to work, but us all coming together to make a large continent, that can make us survive,” he added.
(Reporting by Paul Sandle; editing by Sarah Young)
