Fibrus, has started a consultation process with its staff on the roles that will be affected by the redundancy announcement but the company has said it plans to continue to grow its customer facing areas while the workforce in network construction and relevant supporting areas is expected to be reduced.
Fibrus has attracted over £750m of committed capital, including £235m from investors, £220m from a banking consortium and the rest as public subsidy including £197m Project Stratum – 85,000 premises by March 2025 in N.Ireland along with the £108m Project Gigabit contract for 60,000 premises in Cumbria, England under the Hyperfast GB project.
Given the current state of the market and rising build costs, the operator has taken the decision to pull out and focus on their existing builds in Northern Ireland and Cumbria (both commercial and state aid supported ones).
Fibrus has established a training hub at Newton Rigg to build its own in house trained network construction teams for its planned UK projects including the Cumbria delivery of Project Gigabit.
It’s not yet known if the announcements and redundancy plans will impact the company’s Newton Rigg facility and network construction teams locally.
Dominic Kearns, Chief Executive of Fibrus, said:
“Given the state and cost of the capital markets we have taken the decision to focus our equity and debt funding in our home markets of NI and Cumbria, hence our withdrawal from the NE Gigabit process. Our business remains funded for all our existing programmes and when the markets stabilise again, we will seek out further growth opportunities.
For the moment, we are committed to delivering our network for those most in need across rural Cumbria and Northern Ireland, including our two government subsidised contracts. Pleasingly, our customer take-up and brand continue to grow rapidly across our Cumbria and Northern Ireland, and we plan to focus on accelerating it.”
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