Analysis of the business situation of the Virgin Mobile Essay

Analysis of the business situation of the Virgin Mobile - Essay Example bile operates as a virtual network operator, riding on the physical network of T-Mobile, and later Everything Everywhere (Answers Corporation, 2014; Virgin Mobile USA, 2009; Telecompaper, 2014; RCRWirelessAdmin, 2011; RCRWirelessAdmin, 2013; Thomas, 2013; Ofcom, 2013). Virgin Media UK provides a breakdown of financial data for Virgin Mobile in its UK investor relations reports of financial performance. That aside one can get a glimpse of the kinds of numbers that Virgin Mobile is able to generate too, by looking at the financial and subscriber data for Virgin Media, which is the owner of Virgin Mobile in the UK. As of end of December of 2013, Virgin Mobile had about three million customers, a third of whom are prepaid customers, while more than two million are postpaid customers. They offer voice and data services to this customer base, as well as content. The direction of growth is towards increasing the base of postpaid customers (Virgin Media, 2013; Virgin Media, 2014). Moving on to the financial numbers, total revenues for 2013 amounted to 1.846 billion pounds, a substantial slowdown from revenues of over 3 billion pounds for 2011 and for 2012. As a group, this slowdown reflects a general drop in total revenues for the Virgin Media Group, from about 4 billion pounds for 2011 and for 2012, to just 2.3 billion pounds for 2013. The large drop can be attributed to the large drop in revenues for Virgin Mobile (Virgin Media, 2013; Virgin Media, 2014; Google, 2014b). The chosen SBU unit for analysis in this paper is Virgin Mobile n the UK, as a subsidiary of Virgin Media. In turn, Virgin Media has been bought by Liberty Global, with the Virgin Group being able to retain a small share of total ownership after the acquisition. In terms of competition, the big players include BT, Vodafone, and a slew of broadband players like BSkyB also making plays in the same set industry. EE also competes in this same space, the firm providingVirgin Mobile with the physical