In the busy holiday quarter, Virgin Mobile USA (NYSE: VM) easily blew past its expectations for customer additions, saying it added a net 216,000 compared to its previously reported expectations of between 60,000 and 100,000. Virgin’s CEO Dan Schulman: “Our new offers have helped lead to strong customer growth and improved retention. Our hybrid plans continue to grow in popularity, accounting for over 50 percent of our gross adds in October and November and 29 percent of our subscriber base at the end of November. We expect the growth of these plans to lead to continued improvement in ARPU trends in the fourth quarter of 2008.” Churn for the quarter was 4.8 percent, which was below Q3 churn of 5.5 percent.

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Virgin ended the year with about 5.38 million customers, including Helio subscribers, which they acquired in August. During the year, the company attracted more than 3.3 million customers. Of course, the company has renewed incentive to add customers since Sprint is now paying Virgin Mobile USA $4.50 for each new customer it adds. Release.