Corporate History
Until 2000 Elisa was a telephone cooperative known as Helsingin puhelinyhdistys (HPY). HPY started expanding during the 1930s by merging with smaller cooperative telephone operators. The company reached its current geographical operating field in 1958. The original form of incorporation, a mutual association, was changed to a legal cooperative (Helsingin puhelinosuuskunta) in 1995. The cooperative was finally demutualized in 2000.
Investment company Novator Partners acquired a 10.4% stake in Elisa in 2005 through a share swap when Elisa bought the smaller operator Saunalahti, which had been mostly owned by Novator. Novator tried to revamp Elisa in December 2007, but was opposed by Finnish institutions such as Varma Mutual Pension Insurance Company. On October 13, 2008, during the Icelandic financial crisis, it was announced that Novator had sold its entire stake in Elisa to Varma for 194 million euros (US$266 million), a price of €11.20/share.
Read more about this topic: Elisa (company)
Famous quotes containing the words corporate and/or history:
“If when a businessman speaks of minority employment, or air pollution, or poverty, he speaks in the language of a certified public accountant analyzing a corporate balance sheet, who is to know that he understands the human problems behind the statistical ones? If the businessman would stop talking like a computer printout or a page from the corporate annual report, other people would stop thinking he had a cash register for a heart. It is as simple as that—but that isn’t simple.”
—Louis B. Lundborg (1906–1981)
“This above all makes history useful and desirable: it unfolds before our eyes a glorious record of exemplary actions.”
—Titus Livius (Livy)