Virgin Media posts its first annual profit
FIVE years after it was launched with an estimated £20m branding exercise, 13 giant poster sites around Britain and a television ad campaign voiced by Uma Thurman, Virgin Media has swung into the black for the first time.
The cable operator posted net income of £75.9m, its first annual profit since it was launched in 2007 as a merger between Virgin Mobile and NTL: Telewest.
It also beat fourth quarter expectations as customers snapped up the combination of its new TV service and fast broadband offerings, part of its strategy to counter the economic slump by selling more products to existing customers.
Neil Berkett, chief executive, said: “Our strategy of focusing on customers who want more from the digital world is paying off.”
The number of people taking Virgin Media’s new TiVo TV service, which offers on-demand programming, more than doubled in the fourth quarter with 273,000 net additions. It had 435,000 TiVo customers at the end of the year, 12 per cent of the overall television base. During the quarter 133,000 new and existing customers moved to its superfast broadband.
The firm, listed mainly in New York but also traded in London, said it will create 620 customer service jobs.
Revenue rose two per cent for the quarter to £1bn and the full-year figure was up three per cent to £4bn. Operational cash flow rose five per cent for the quarter and 5.3 per cent over the year.