Things are moving along, according to a March 31 report in the Australian, which said Macquarie Capital had been appointed “to investigate whether to sell NZ$1b of council-owned fibre optic assets in Christchurch”.

Slater had no comment on the report.

The CCHL report does note that it can only comment on Enable’s value and strategic considerations.

The decision to sell a major council asset can only be made by a majority vote of councillors.

A sale would also require Overseas Investment Office approval (a jumpable hurdle given the agency’s blanket approvals for other telco asset sales).

A new owner would also have to be happy to be regulated by the Commerce Commission and continue Enable as a wholesale-only fibre provider (selling to broadband retailers like Spark, One NZ and 2degrees).

So what could Enable be worth?

Enable was formed in 2007 after the council decided Telecom (now split into Spark and Chorus) was dragging its heels in upgrading Christchurch from copper lines.

Four years later, it won the Ultrafast Broadband (UFB) fibre rollout contract for Christchurch, Rangiora and Rolleston, which has been its primary business ever since.

Its fibre network now passes 222,000 properties, with 161,000 of those connected to its services.

CCHL’s 2026 interim report says Enable’s independently-assessed “investment value” is $714m.

That makes it the council-controlled company’s third-largest asset, behind its 89%-owned Christchurch Airport ($1.72b) and 75%-owned lines company Orion ($1.63b), and ahead of the 100% council-owned Lyttelton Port Company ($459m).

Enable’s 2025 annual report lists the value of its total assets at $892.3m and its UFB fibre network at a “midpoint” of $845m (with a “lower value ” of $779m and an upper value of $923m).

Last year, Enable made a $41.1m net profit on $119.2m in revenue and had ebitda of $99.0m.

It paid a $25m dividend to the council.

The wrinkle is $294m in “borrowings”, just under a debt-to-ebitda target ratio of three times.

The money was initially owed to Crown Fibre Holdings (now Crown Infrastructure Partners) but was transferred to CCHL in 2021.

What its North Island twin went for

The most immediately comparable sale is the company now known as Tuatahi First Fibre, which won the UFB contract for several central North Island centres and laid fibre past 237,000 properties (to Enable’s 222,000).

In 2020, WEL Networks (85%) and Waipa Networks (15%) sold Tuatahi to First State Investments (backed by Australian, Canadian, and Japanese investors) for $854m.

Are there buyers?

There has been a wave of telco asset sales across Australia and New Zealand over the past few years, with buyers including Canadian, Australian and superannuation funds, Singapore’s sovereign fund and private equity giants like Blackstone and Brookfield.

In 2022, Vocus NZ, which traded as Orcon Group, was bought by Macquarie Asset Management and Aware Super. With its new, deep-pocketed owners behind it, Orcon then turned around and bought 2degrees for $1.7b (the merged operation trades as 2degrees).

Spark realised around $1.2b selling the passive assets of its cell tower network to the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board in two transactions over 2022 and 2023.

The company created for the deal, Connexa, went on to buy 2degrees’ mobile network passive assets for $1.1b in 2023.

One NZ, meanwhile, sold its cell tower passive assets in 2022 to London-based InfraRed Capital Partners, Toronto’s Northleaf Capital Partners and one of its corporate parents, Infratil, in a $1.7b deal (the buyers formed Fortysouth to manage the towers).

2022 also saw the NZ-founded, Government-backed Hawaiki Cable (whose founders are now pushing a giant data centre for Southland) sold to Singapore’s BW Group for an undisclosed sum. The trans-Pacific cable cost around $445m to lay.

In January this year, Spark sold 75% of its data centre business to Australia’s Pacific Equity Partners for $705m.

More deals could be on the way.

Vector is trying to sell its fibre network, which market reports have valued at around $220m. (The process, first announced in May 2025, is now starting to drag.)

The Government is mulling options to sell the $1.1b in debt securities issued to Chorus to part-fund the UFB rollout.

And One NZ recently reorganised its fibre operations into a discrete unit, Eon Fibre, that could be run as a separate business, sparking sale speculation, although the telco said it had no immediate plans for a sell-off.

“Eon Fibre is demonstrating good future stand-alone growth opportunities,” One NZ owner Infratil said in its 2026 first-half results investor presentation.

Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.