Virgin Mobile USA: profit, ARPU down
The sad part of Virgin Mobile's Q2 earnings story is that it lost customers (to the tune of some 111,000), saw ARPU slide from $20.97 to $19.32 year over year, and watched its profits get halved over the same period to a slim $3.5 million. The happy part? Hey, at least they're in the black, and we're sure they'd rather break even than hemorrhage cash the way virtually all of their MVNO brethren have. At any rate, the company thinks that it'll turn things around heading into '09 with the addition of Helio to its portfolio, which it confirms will be leveraged to offer "new data services and feature-rich handsets" -- both concepts that bare-bones Virgin isn't accustomed to offering in the States. The Ocean 2 would be a nice way to kick off that plan, would it not?
