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We’re playing late catch-up today with the latest company results for Rochdale-based ISP Zen Internet, which reveal that the venerable UK internet provider grew their broadband customer base to 225,000 at the end of Sept 2025 (up from 208k in 2024) and saw operating profit jump from £1.9m to £3m – partly fuelled by the sale of some IPv4 address blocks.
The company’s full year revenues increased by 5% to £127m (2024: £121m), while EBITDA (i.e. earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation) grew to £7.1m (2024: £5.7m), Zen’s net assets totalled £30.3m (2024: £28.4m) and their gross profit grew by 17.2% (2024: 19.9%).
The reduction in gross profit compared with 2024 is largely down to the fact that Zen’s supply chain costs of providing their services have risen, but the ISP didn’t pass most of that on to their customers due to their price promise guarantees (bigger ISPs rarely do the same). Zen has also faced some costs from migrating end-users away from legacy copper services to “lower margin full fibre” lines.
Otherwise, Zen said much of the growth in their consumer broadband base (up 15%) came from newer full fibre services and their partnership with CityFibre. On the flip side some customer losses were recorded in their business and partner divisions, which meant the overall broadband base grew by 8% (this is still up from 5% in 2024).
The improvement in EBITDA and operating profit is more interesting, since this is said to be the “result of the profit on disposal of £4.8m made on the sale of IPv4 address blocks and income from [alternative network] integration arrangements of £1.3m (2024 – £0.2m).” This perhaps give context to some of Zen’s recent IP address migrations (here).
Zen are reinvesting this into their technology resources, AltNet aggregation work (Fibre Hub), greater use of AI and customer self-serve applications. Some £2.1m of capital was invested by Zen into its core business in the year (2024: £2.9m).
Finally, Zen’s results revealed that the operator had a total staff count of 569, which is unchanged from the previous year.