The UK mobile phone operator Virgin Mobile has said it has moved into profit ahead of schedule.

The company said profit before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation was �3.4m for the first three months of the year.

Customer numbers increased to 1.6 million, and Virgin Mobile forecast it would have more than two million customers by the end of the year.

But analysts said the company's statement begged as many questions as it answered.

Not stating the 'churn'

Virgin Mobile is not required to report in such depth as rivals including Vodafone, Orange and MM02 because it is not listed on a stock market.

"The key thing is they're not stating what their churn is," said John Fletcher of Analysys Consulting.

A company's churn rate indicates the percentage of existing customers failing to renew subscriptions or continue as customers - something many analysts view as a key measure of a mobile phone operator's health.

There are also questions over how much it is costing Virgin to add subscribers.

Analysts say selling through outlets such as Carphone Warehouse and Phones4U will have pushed up the cost to the company of acquiring customers compared with the previous model of direct sales only.

3G question

On the plus side, says Mr Fletcher, Virgin has "made its presence felt" and is "doing OK within the niche it went for".

Virgin chairman Sir Richard Branson said he was "particularly proud" of Virgin's achievement as shown in the latest results "because we've done all this in a market which has seen mobile growth fall by a factor of five over the past year".

Mr Fletcher said it was "too early to say where Virgin will end up" but a key challenge would be to develop an offering for third-generation (3G) mobile phone services - the coming technology that will offer video, networked games and high-speed mobile internet access.

Virgin Mobile is a joint venture between Virgin Group and Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile.

It is a "virtual operator", owning no network of its own but renting capacity from T-Mobile.

The German-owned operator has secured a 3G licence for the UK but, so far, no deal has been done over granting Virgin access to the coming network.