NTL Telewest has completed its £962.4m takeover of Virgin Mobile, and says it will provide consumers with their first opportunity to buy a ‘quadruple-play’ of TV, internet and fixed and mobile telephony services from a single operator.
The two companies will continue to operate as separate organisations until early 2007, when they will start marketing a single portfolio of services under the Virgin brand.
Steve Burch, chief executive officer of NTL:Telewest, said: “This is a transformational deal for NTL:Telewest and good news for UK consumers. Virgin Mobile has a justified reputation for being one of the country’s most customer focused companies. This combined with NTL:Telewest’s portfolio of competitively priced, cutting edge products, will create a formidable competitor in the UK’s fast changing communications and entertainment industries.
Alan Gow, managing director of Virgin Mobile said: “Virgin Mobile’s growth from a start-up to one of the UK’s most pre-eminent and successful mobile operators in such a short time has been nothing short of meteoric. We’re looking forward to taking the experience, values, and attitude that have got us where we are today and applying them to the challenge of the future: of building with our new colleagues at NTL:Telewest a world-class, new Virgin company with the most exciting range of communications and entertainment services in the UK.”
Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, commented: “Today, we’ve created a unique organisation, a new, soon-to-be-branded Virgin company, which will offer the very finest in ‘quadruple’ the best value, most exciting TV, broadband, mobile and phone services in Britain. We’re entering a pioneering time, where the worlds of media, entertainment and communications are coming together, and through our new company our aim is to offer consumers the very best, most sought after choice available. You ain’t, as the saying goes, seen nothing yet.”
In March this year NTL completed a merger with Telewest Global, creating the UK’s largest provider of residential broadband and the UK’s leading provider of triple play services.
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