We supported Cube Infrastructure Managers in raising funding for its rural fibre connectivity initiative in Croatia and Slovenia, known as RuNe Group

The problem

• Cube Infrastructure Managers (Cube), an independent management company focusing on investments in the European infrastructure space, was seeking private-sector funding for the deployment of a high-quality fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) open access network to residential, business and public administration premises in rural areas of Croatia and Slovenia through RuNe Group¹
• Analysys Mason was appointed by Cube to carry out an independent commercial and technical due diligence study of the planned FTTH network

The solution

• We carried out a review of the Slovenian and Croatian telecoms market, including an overview of both markets, the regulatory environment for telecoms services in each country, broadband coverage and penetration levels, and range of technologies used
• Our commercial due diligence study also included an assessment of competition and the risk of overbuild across RuNe Group’s footprint for each market, to validate the take-up assumptions in the business plan:
  • for Croatia, given the lack of granular network data, we developed a computing code to obtain coverage data at premises level for the main operators in the country
  • for Slovenia, we assessed the risk of overbuild based on granular data on per address basis published by the Statistics Office
• We reviewed the proposed commercial strategy and conducted interviews with management to assess RuNe Group’s capacity to achieve its take-up targets

Figure: Output of geospatial overbuild analysis in Slovenia

The result

• As a result of our work, RuNe Group was successful in securing EUR130 million of private investment from four European banks (Banks Kommunalkredit Austria AG, Norddeutsche Landesbank Girozentrale (Nord LB) and EBRD in Erste Group Bank AG) in March 2022

¹ RuNe Group is the entity that was set up by Cube’s Connecting Europe Broadband Fund (CEBF, a greenfield single-sector fund focusing on fiber investment) for the deployment and operation a fibre network in rural areas of Croatia and Slovenia