Record revenues and first year of profitability:

Delivered record 34% increase in revenue to £134m
Consumer revenues increased by 73%
Adjusted EBITDA of £5m, in first full year of profitability since starting our scale rollout

Customer take-up continues to grow:

Added over 181,000 net new customers, reaching 518,000 total live customers
Take-up of over 40% in mature cohorts
Penetration of cohorts in their first 12 months has nearly doubled since 2021

Strategic partnership with Sky doubles addressable market:

Secured long-term strategic agreement with Sky and on track to launch consumer services over our nationwide network in 2025
Agreement nearly doubles CityFibre’s addressable market with Consumer Internet Service Providers (ISPs) on the platform now accounting for 49% of UK broadband market share

Over halfway to rollout milestone of 8m premises:

Network passed over 4.3m premises
Added over 900,000 Ready for Service (RFS) premises in 2024, totalling more than 4.1m premises RFS nationwide
Maintained stable nominal cost per premises passed over the past four years
Secured five new Project Gigabit wins. CityFibre now has nine BDUK lots and subsidies totalling over £865m
> Work underway in all lots, and over 20,000 premises RFS delivered to date
> Early take up in Project Gigabit areas even faster than on existing footprint
CityFibre will deliver network to a further million premises for our partners in 2025

Consolidation and integration model proven:

Lit Fibre acquired in May 2024, adding 280,000 premises to CityFibre’s footprint
Lit Fibre’s network successfully integrated with CityFibre’s wholesale platform in less than nine months
CityFibre will continue to participate in the consolidation of the sector into a sustainable third, national network

Market-leading network technology:

Rollout of best-in-class XGS-PON technology continues with full network upgrade on track to complete mid 2025, ahead of schedule
Network upgrade supports UK’s fastest and most reliable symmetrical wholesale service portfolio with tiers up to 2.5Gbps currently available to partners and a roadmap to 7.9Gbps services in future

Service capabilities drive customer satisfaction and lower cost to serve:

Over 99% of customers are offered an installation date within 5 working days compared to an industry benchmark of 80% within 10 working days
Over 95% of installs are completed Right First Time
99.97% network availability
Trustpilot rating of 4.6/5

Greg Mesch, Chief Executive Officer at CityFibre, said: “2024 was a definitive year for CityFibre. We achieved our first full year of profitability, signed a new strategic partnership with Sky, which doubled our retail sales capacity, and solidified our position as the UK’s leading independent wholesale network.

"As we look ahead to 2025 and beyond, we are confident in delivering accelerated, profitable growth across our expanding platform, with half the UK broadband market now served by our partners. We will also harness our increased participation in government’s Project Gigabit and make the most of a rapidly emerging altnet consolidation opportunity, realising the benefits of infrastructure competition for consumers, businesses and for the UK.”

STRATEGIC PRIORITIES

Our strategic priorities ensure CityFibre reaches scale and our full potential as the leading competitor to BT Openreach and the wholesale network of choice for consumer and business ISPs, mobile network operators and service integrators.

Doing so will ensure a sustainable competitive infrastructure market that will deliver long-term benefits for consumers, businesses and the UK economy.

Our strategic priorities are to:

Expand our wholesale-only network to more than 8m UK premise
Drive take-up across all market verticals (residential, business, public sector and mobile)
Deliver market-leading products and services across the UK’s most advanced full fibre network.

OPERATIONAL REVIEW

In 2024, we made significant progress towards our strategic priorities, supported by robust financial performance characterised by growing revenue and operating profitability.

Growing our network:

We added over 900,000 Ready for Service (RFS) premises in 2024, including our organic build programme, Project Gigabit rollouts and acquired footprint. This brought our total RFS premises to 4.1m, more than halfway to our rollout ambition of at least 8m.

2024 marked a strategic shift from our focus on organic build, to a more balanced model of network expansion, maximising the potential for subsidised participation in the government’s ‘Project Gigabit’ programme alongside a rapidly emerging altnet consolidation opportunity. This model will provide a cost-effective, profitable and scalable strategy to accelerate our network expansion and maximise the availability of serviceable premises to our customers. We plan to extend our network by a further million premises in 2025.

Central to this strategy is our expanded participation in ‘Project Gigabit’. In January 2024, we were awarded five new contracts under the programme, bringing our total to nine contracts, worth £780m in subsidies. Since then, we have worked closely with BDUK to refine the build programmes which has increased the subsidies to a total of over £865m. The scale of this participation has led to a reprofiling of our build plans, increasing our focus on densifying rural areas close to our existing urban networks.

Build is now underway in all nine awarded contract areas. Over 20,000 subsidised premises are already RFS, and live services are available in five project areas. These contracts underpin our rollout to over 1.3m subsidised and commercial premises and will see CityFibre become the principal provider of fibre infrastructure in these areas.

While deployment is at an early stage, there are early indications of strong consumer demand and take-up. Across the areas currently deployed, we are seeing an average of 60% faster take-up when compared to non-intervention areas. This serves to underpin our confidence in the strategic value of the expanded Project Gigabit footprint.

M&A:

In May 2024, we announced the completion of our acquisition of Lit Fibre, adding 280,000 RFS premises to our network as well as over 10,000 retail customers. In accordance with our wholesale-only model, we sold the acquired ISP to its co-founders while prioritising the integration of the acquired network. This was completed by year-end and the footprint is now RFS to our ISP customers, supporting our full product portfolio.

Combined, CityFibre and the altnets currently serve approximately 16m premises across the UK. As such, this represents a major opportunity for CityFibre to deliver a bigger footprint much more quickly and efficiently for our ISP partners. As the largest of the challenger networks, we are in a strong position to consolidate these footprints, and we believe the opportunity for acquisitions to be significant and growing.

Growing our customers:

In 2024 we added over 181,000 net consumer customers to reach a total of 518,000 (up 54% YoY).

Customer growth was reinforced by improving penetration across our network. In our most mature cohorts such as those in Milton Keynes and Stirling, we are now seeing penetration exceed 40%, a material outperformance of our trading partners versus their national market share. We are also seeing a material improvement in early-life penetration with rates nearly doubling between 2021 and 2024.

These improvements are due to our maturing wholesale model which provides an increasing choice of ISPs and services for consumers and is further supported by the improved marketing efficiency of our partners. On average we now have eight ISP partners selling in each location.

The long-term strategic agreement that we secured with Sky in August 2024 represented a huge vote of confidence in the maturity of CityFibre’s wholesale-only business model. It underpins our future consumer volumes and take-up expectations, nearly doubling our addressable market with consumer ISPs on our platform now accounting for 49% of UK broadband market share. We look forward to supporting Sky’s launch of their market-leading services across our national network in 2025.

Our confidence is further supported by the fact that ISPs materially outperform on CityFibre’s network versus Openreach, securing twice their average market share. This is driven by CityFibre’s unique proposition for ISPs focused on:

Best prices: our pure wholesale model enables us to provide attractive service pricing, enabling ISPs to gain share on our footprint while lowering cost and increasing margin
Best product: we have the UK’s largest XGS-PON network, supporting market-leading multi-gig services featuring symmetrical upload and download speeds
Best service: our focus on service drives a great experience for customers and a lower cost to serve for ISPs

CityFibre also continues to benefit from its established, multi-vertical model across residential, business, public sector and mobile sectors. Non-consumer channels continue to underpin take-up, giving us confidence in ongoing growth across our footprint.

SUMMARY

CityFibre built strong momentum through 2024 and this is set to continue in 2025 as we complete our financing, further our strategic priorities and significantly accelerate our growth.

Working closely with our new partner Sky, we will support the launch of its broadband services over our national network, while continuing to enable all our ISP partners to grow their market share thanks to our market-leading products, services and economics.

We will also continue to expand our market-leading XGS-PON platform, delivering a further million premises to our partners as we focus on Project Gigabit rollouts and the rapidly emerging altnet consolidation opportunity.

The year ahead will mark an important inflection point for our business as we prove the benefits of our wholesale-only model; with rapidly increasing revenues and stable underlying operating costs resulting in a resilient and sustainable high gross margin business.

View CityFibre's Trading Update 2024 slide deck here.

¹ Pending final audit