The name Virgin has gone beyond what had made it famous in the past with ventures in the music recording and airline business. The Virgin Group, Ltd of British tycoon Sir Richard Branson now owns completely or partially more than 400 companies with a net worth of over ₤5 Billion.
As a holding company, the Virgin Group makes no pretenses at having any business focus as the companies it holds are distinct and unrelated, encompassing the whole range of lifestyle products and services including travel and leisure, health management, information and media content, publication, healthcare, transportation and telecommunications.
It also has some radical business endeavors like a sperm bank in the Virgin Health Bank as well as Virgin Galactic which markets commercial space flight on spaceships designed by Scaled Composites. You also have Virgin Drinks that make colas and vodka, Virgin Flowers, an online florist, Virgin Comics, a comic book publisher and Virgin Energy, a UK power utility firm.
But the more famous ones like Virgin Atlantic have spawned other airlines like Virgin Blue, an Australian airline flying in the South Pacific islands as well as related travel and leisure services like hotels and cruises under Virgin Holidays and Virgin Limited Edition. It also operates the Virgin Radio with radio stations across many countries like the Europe 2 radio station in France. It recently added Virgin racing as a new racing team in the 2010 Formula One season.
A Virtual Operator
And in the mobile phone industry, its Virgin Mobile stands out as the first virtual mobile phone operator with a presence in 7 countries to date with expansion plans afoot. Being virtual is just a new information age term to describe a subcontractor who buys wholesale and resells directly to consumers at a mark-up. In the case of mobile telephony, unlike Vodafone, Orange or T-Mobile, Virgin Mobile buys bandwidth allocation from a major telco such as T-Mobile and rebrands it at competitive prices to its markets.
The idea simplifies the mobile telephony business so that the operator doesn't need to worry about recovering capital costs in putting up the necessary 2G/3G networks. Telcos are more than willing to sell bandwidth at discounted wholesale prices that allow virtual operators like Virgin to thrive.
A Short History
The business model prompted the Virgin Group and then GMS operator One2One to form a joint venture company called Virgin Mobile in 1999. One2One eventually became T-Mobile with new owner Deutsche Telekom giving up its 50% share in the joint venture to Virgin Group which again created a joint venture with NLT-Telewest to become the first quadruple player in the media business under the Virgin Media company which now has interest in television broadcasting, standards fixed line telephony, mobile telephony and broadband internet.
The rest as they say is history, with Virgin Mobile landing in Australia using the Optus network as its bandwidth provider, the US with Sprint-Nextel, Canada with Bell, France with Orange, India with Tata Indicom and South Africa with Cell C. Pakistan is the next country it plans to operate.
Find out more about Virgin Media at www.moby1.co.uk. They compare contracts for the phones on the Virgin Mobile network. You can also search through the best deals available for PAYG phones
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