Virgin Media logs on to subscriber gain

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Virgin Media, the troubled cable television, broadband and telephony provider has reported a rare piece of good news, clocking up a gain in overall customer numbers for its fourth quarter.

The company, which has struggled to control heavy customer churn rates for some time, clocked up 24,400 new customers overall across its services once customer churn had been taken into account.

Customer churn was 1.4 per cent of the entire customer base a month across the quarter, while the company formally known as NTL Telewest signed up 61,100 net new additions to its digital cable TV service, 111,200 to broadband and 52,300 to its telephony services. The Virgin Mobile business racked up 47,500 contract customers, continuing its diversification away from just pay-as-yo-go consumer business.

However, all the positive aspects of Virgin Media's results failed to offset the fact that the company continues to run at a loss. For the fourth quarter, the company clocked up a operating loss of £18 million. Operating income before depreciation, amortisation and other charges was £321 million, ahead of analyst forecasts of £307 million. Turnover was slightly ahead of forecasts at £1.051 billion, beating analyst estimates of £1.048 billion.

"Our fourth quarter results represent our best operational performance since the cable merger in early 2006," said Neil Berkett, Virgin Media's active chief executive. "We are achieving good results from our stated strategy of exploiting our network capability to drive broadband growth and deliver on-demand content, as well as focusing on reducing churn."

The company is continuing its dispute with BSkyB over carriage of Sky's channels on the cable network, and over Sky's stake in terrestrial broadcaster ITV.

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