More jobs to go at Telewest as write-offs push loss to £2.2bn

Telewest, the cable group that is continuing to thrash out a rescue restructuring, unveiled a £2.2bn loss yesterday after accounting for a string of exceptional charges and warning that more jobs would go.

But the company, which has cut 1,450 jobs over the past year leaving it with a workforce of about 9,000, insisted there would be no more compulsory redundancies. "Through attrition, we expect that number to be lower by several hundred – more than a couple of hundred, less than five hundred – but through attrition," Charles Burdick, Telewest's managing director, said yesterday.

There was no update, however, on the company's financial restructuring – a process that has already taken close to a year, racking up fees of £22m, and one that will see shareholders left with just 3 per cent of the business.

"I've missed earlier deadlines ... so I'm not giving specific forecasts any more," Mr Burdick said. But he added: "I just don't see any major obstacles [to completing the restructuring] from any of them [stakeholders]."

In 2002, Telewest took a £1.6bn charge, mainly to cover the impairment of goodwill relating to the purchase of Cable London and Birmingham Cable.

That charge, and other exceptional fees, pushed Telewest further into the red, with a pretax loss of £2.2bn for the year compared with a £1.9bn loss in 2001. The stock closed down 0.25p at 2.35p. But on an underlying, or Ebitda, basis, Telewest made a £379m profit, up 19 per cent, on sales that were more or less flat at £1.3bn.

Telewest lost 1,485 telephony customers last year and 47,973 cable TV customers but added 177,097 broadband users, taking its total to just under 300,000.