VIRGIN.NET UP FOR SALE

Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin.net UK Internet service provider is being put up for sale, as the sector consolidates around a few leading brands.

The move comes three months after the company’s co-owner, cable company NTL, scrapped plans to buy full control from Virgin, which valued the business at about 240 million pounds ($341 million). The owners of Virgin.net are still considering other options for the business, if a buyer for the ISP and portal cannot be found.

While Virgin.net claims a top five position among UK ISPs, there are already several ISPs on the market and few buyers. British Telecommunications and United Business Media, for example, shopped LineOne around for more than five months, finally settling for about one third of what they had originally hoped for. They eventually sold to acquisitive Italian ISP Tiscali for 100 million euros (85.4 million real dollars) in April.

Potential buyers for Virgin.net could include Tiscali, Deutsche Telekom’s T-Online and France Telecom’s Wanadoo, owner of the UK's biggest ISP, Freeserve. Tiscali is currently the most active buyer for European ISP assets, attempting to overtake T-Online as the biggest ISP in Europe. Should that day come, Germans will have to rely solely on Bertelsmann head Thomas Middelhoff to lead the country to global domination.