Virgin Media, the UK-based ‘quad-play’ operator, has reported a second-quarter net loss of £447.2 million after writing down the value of its Virgin Mobile MVNO business by £366.2 million. However, once this charge was stripped out of the figures, Virgin Media’s underlying operating profit for the quarter reached £333 million, beating most analyst expectations. In what is considered a traditionally weak quarter for the firm, it added that it was seeing some success in attracting higher-spending subscribers and reducing churn.

Commenting on the mobile write-down, Virgin Media said that a review showed that its mobile business’s fair value was less than its carrying value and that the valuations for the business declined from the prior year as a result of “declining market multiples of comparable companies in the mobile industry,” reports Bloomberg. Virgin Mobile was merged with the cable operator NTL/Telewest in 2006 to create the Virgin Media brand and to enable a quad-play offering of TV, fixed-line telephony, broadband and mobile. According to Reuters, Virgin Media increased its number of triple-play customers to a record 53 percent in the second-quarter, but this excluded mobile.