Industry Telecommunications Number of employees 4,146 (average, 2015) Headquarters Helsinki, Finland | Area served Estonia,
Finland Revenue 1.57 billion EUR (2015) Founded 1882, Helsinki, Finland | |
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Type Julkinen osakeyhtiö (Nasdaq Helsinki: ELISA) Key people Raimo Lind (Chairman), Veli-Matti Mattila (President and CEO) Products Retail and wholesale fixed-line and mobile telecommunications services, internet services Stock price ELISA (HEL) € 32.13 -0.12 (-0.37%)8 Mar, 6:29 PM GMT+2 - Disclaimer CEO Veli-Matti Mattila (1 Jul 2003–) Subsidiaries Saunalahti, Sulake, Elisa Videra Oy, PPO-Yhtiöt Oy Profiles | ||
Elisa Oyj is a Finnish telecommunications company founded in 1882. It was called HPY HTF until July 2000. The mobile operations of Elisa were previously known as Radiolinja.
Today Elisa is a telecommunications, ICT and online service company serving 2.3 million consumer, corporate and public administration organisation customers. Elisa provides environmentally sustainable services for communication and entertainment, and tools for improving operating methods and productivity of organisations. In Finland Elisa is the market leader in mobile and fixed network subscriptions. Cooperation with Vodafone and Telenor enables globally competitive services. Elisa is listed on Nasdaq Helsinki Large Cap with approximately 200,000 shareholders. Elisa's revenue in 2016 was 1.64 billion euros and it employed 4,300 people.
History
Elisa was originally established on 31 January 1882 by the electrical engineer Daniel Wadén (fi) as a telephone cooperative called the Helsinki Telephone Association (Finnish: Helsingin puhelinyhdistys, HPY, Swedish: Helsingfors telefonförening HTF). HPY began serving customers on 6 June 1882 by connecting 56 phone numbers; by 1884 the number of yearly calls surpassed one million.
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 demutualised in 2000.
Elisa launched the first commercial GSM service under the Radiolinja brand in 1991 and the world's first commercial UMTS900 network on 8 November 2007.
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. In October 2008, during the Icelandic financial crisis, Novator sold its entire stake in Elisa to Varma for 194 million euros (US$266 million), a price of €11.20 per share.