Virgin Media, the UK cable company suffered an operating loss of £333m after writing down £366m of its mobile phone business.

Its initial value of £960m, when Sir Richard Branson sold it in 2006, now stands at £600m.

Presenting results of second-quarter, chief executive Neil Berkett mentioned that company’s operating loss in three months to June was £333m, against profit of £3m for the corresponding period last year. The decline in number of new customers due to shifting of houses when home owners disconnect cable, resulted in revenue fall of £4.5m to £990.5m

But Berkett is confident and claims that under a tougher economic environment, company has shown good resilience and would overcome the economic uncertainties successfully.

The percentage of customers deserting the company has continued falling down and stands at 9.7 per cent compared to BSkyB’s 9.8 per cent a year. This rate of 9.7 per cent which was 19 in the second quarter of last year indicates a marked improvement in the defection rate.

50 per cent of Virgin customers avail more than three of its services viz. broadband, television, mobile and landline phone connections. Virgin Media’s “revenue generating units” which represents number of products sold, increased from 142,000 to over 12m.

As a measure for improving revenues, Virgin hooked BBC’s online show library up to its network, enabling its customers to watch iPlayer on their television rather than a computer.