History
Virgin Mobile was launched in November 1999 as a private joint venture between One2One (later T-Mobile) and the Virgin Group. The joint venture involved leasing network bandwidth from One2One and re-selling it under the Virgin Mobile brand, making it significantly cheaper to run than if Virgin operated its own network infrastructure.
The company reported its first annual profit in 2003, following successful Christmas sales.
In 2004 Deutsche Telekom sold their 50% holding in Virgin Mobile to the Virgin Group, with the agreement that if the company were to become public in the following two and a half years they would receive 25% of the proceeds. The two companies had previously argued over the terms of the agreement made in 1999 and Richard Branson had filed a High Court action against T-Mobile.
Richard Branson had considered making Virgin Mobile public in 2002. Eventually dealing in shares of Virgin Mobile began on 21 July 2004, with 37% of the companies made available for sale as an initial public offering. The remaining shares were held by the Virgin Group. At the time the company had 4.1 million customers, employed 1,400 staff in the UK and the listing valued the company at £500m.
Read more about this topic: Virgin Mobile UK
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“Humankind has understood history as a series of battles because, to this day, it regards conflict as the central facet of life.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)