T-Mobile has downgraded the book value of its British business by £1.3bn.This is an accounting convention rather than any comment on trading; T-Mobile changed its valuation of its business simply because the takeover of O2 carries implications for how much a subscriber is really worth.
In fact T- Mobile UK added 845,000 new customers over the last three months of 2005,taking its subscriber base to 17.2m (that includes Virgin Mobile users).Revenues were down 3.6% to £2.84bn,however (because of regulatory price cuts,says T-Mobile) and profits were almost 5% lower at £891m.