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Thursday, 09 August 2007 |
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Poor results and crap credit-raising conditions strip quad-play of its appeal.
Virgin Media is choking in terms of its growth and ambition. It finessed the quad-play initiative when it backed a combination of cable TV, telephony, broadband and mobile following the takeover of Virgin’s MVNO by triple-play stalwarts NTL:Telewest. This has looked like pants ever since.
The company announced yesterday that it has gone into reverse gear where telephony is concerned: losing 60.000 customers. Broadband looks stronger. In the pay-TV sector the company is locked in a battle with the neo-monopolists of Sky. It is the mobile arm that looks weakest today. Whatever the numbers, mobile users are not buying into Virgin Media’s fixed services, nor vice versa.
The most painful spike in the financial anus of Virgin Media is that few of the likely PEIs circling the company with a view to takeover or buyout are still set to swoop. The reason is that America’s crazed fiscal markets have made borrowing a naughty word. Efforts to buy into fore-play look weak.
More annoying, perhaps, for the toothsome Branson man is that any PEI taking control of Virgin Media, which is likely to happen before the end of this year, will piss the MVNO and the content arm Flextech out the back door within about one week of taking charge. T-Mobile might claim the mobile subscribers. Nobody in their right mind will take on Virgin Media’s content arm.
Jim Chalmers
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