By Marcin Sobczyk
WARSAW--Billionaire Richard Branson's Virgin Mobile on Wednesday
launched a pre-paid mobile phone service in Poland, and said it
plans to expand elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe.
"Virgin Mobile Central and Eastern Europe is a new regional
company in the Virgin group," said Kristian Myrup, the unit's head.
"We are looking into expanding our business into Poland obviously,
but also potentially to Turkey, Russia, Hungary and others."
Virgin will operate as a mobile virtual network operator, using
the infrastructure of rivals Orange and Play. The Orange mobile
network is operated in Poland by Telekomunikacja Polska SA
(TPS.WA), which is controlled by France Telecom SA (FTE.FR). The
two other large operators of physical mobile networks are Deutsche
Telekom SA's (DTE.XE) PTC, which uses the T-Mobile brand, and
homegrown operator Polkomtel SA, which markets its service as
Plus.
Virgin is entering a saturated market--at the end of second
quarter, there were more than 52 million active mobile phone cards
in a country with a population of around 38 million, according to
Poland's statistics office. Some of the active cards are used
solely for data transfers.
The U.K. company's Polish unit plans to have at least a million
customers within three years, it said. A minority stake in the firm
is held by Dirlango, a venture owned by Lukasz Wejchert, a former
executive of Polish television broadcaster TVN SA (TVN.WA) and a
former shareholder in TVN's owner, ITI Group.
Write to Marcin Sobczyk at marcin.sobczyk@dowjones.com
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