Virgin Mobile rings in more customers

12 April 2012

SIR Richard Branson's Virgin Mobile said it had bucked the trend in the sector after ringing up a jump in subscriber growth.

Britain's fifth biggest mobile phone operator added 171,367 net connections in the second quarter of the year, 19.2% more than 12 months ago. The group said it had moved into 'long-term' profitability in the three month period, but refused to reveal any figures.

Virgin Mobile boss Tom Alexander said: 'Despite the economic chaos in the rest of the telecoms sector, Virgin Mobile shines as a shining exception. Our growth continues to accelerate, we've moved into profit, and we're looking forward to an even brighter, more colourful future.'

Virgin Mobile is a private joint-venture between the Virgin Group and Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile unit, launched in November 1999. The group has gained by simply piggybacking T-Mobile's mobile phone network rather than building its own.

It hopes to make earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation of £11m this year and reach the 2m customer mark. The subscriber growth in the second quarter compares with 164,223 connections in the first quarter and takes the customer base to 1.78m.

Virgin Mobile's bigger rivals have seen subscriber growth slow as they focus on driving more cash from existing customers and wait to introduce the next generation of 3G mobile phone handsets.

Concerns about future revenue growth and the general economic climate have seen shares in Vodafone and rival mmO2 plunge in recent months. John Tysoe, telecoms analyst at West LB Panmure, said Virgin Mobile's figures 'suggest news of the demise of the mobile phone market are probably exaggerated and there is still scope for growth'. But he added: 'The other operators have just spent £22bn buying 3G licences and are sitting on their hands at the moment.'

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in