Type Subsidiary Net income US$ 1.2 Billion (2010) Founded 13 April 2003, Brazil | Industry Telecommunications Customer service 00 55 11 3056-8628 Number of employees 8,386 | |
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Key people Paulo Cesar Teixeira (CEO) Products Fixed line, Mobile telecommunications, internet services and digital television Revenue US$ 11.5 Billion (2010) Headquarters São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil CEO Eduardo Navarro de Carvalho (1 Jan 2017–) Parent organizations Telefônica Vivo, Telefónica Profiles | ||
Vivo ([ˈvivu], Portuguese for "alive"), legally known as Telefônica Brasil, is the largest telecommunications company in Brazil. It is headquartered in São Paulo.
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History
The company was originally formed as part of Telebrás, the state-owned telecom monopoly at the time. In 1998, Telebrás was demerged and privatized, with Telefónica taking Telesp. Telesp was rebranded as Telefonica from 1998 until April 15, 2012, when all Telefonica services were rebranded again to Vivo, using the same strategy of unifying all its services in a unique brand, like Movistar (Hispanic America and Spain) and O2 (rest of Europe). Currently, the Telefonica brand is only used for the group Telefônica Brasil.
Vivo brands
Vivo owns the following brands:
Vivo Móvel
The Vivo brand was launched on April 13, 2003, as a mobile phone service provider. It's the largest provider in Brazil with over 76 million users. It originated from the merger of several Brazilian mobile phone operations under a joint-venture owned equally by Portugal Telecom (PT) and Spain's Telefónica. Until 2006, the group was composed of six holding companies which, as announced in November 2005, merged into a single holding company, Vivo Participações S.A.. The operation was concluded on February 22, 2006. In July 2010, Telefónica bought PT's shares.
Most of its network was initially based on IS-95, though there were parts of it that were still analog AMPS and parts (resulting from acquisition of other companies) using TDMA (IS-136). These are all being converted to GSM since 2006, when, after years being the only CDMA network, Vivo announced a GSM network, and that it would operate in both CDMA and GSM. The CDMA network was gradually converted to CDMA2000 in the major cities. All CDMA network was discontinued on November 2012
Today Vivo operates an UMTS, HSDP 3G networks and band 7 4G LTE in major cities.
Merged companies
The following operators merged to form Vivo:
Owned by Portugal Telecom
Owned by Telefónica
Acquired by the joint venture
New operations in the Northeast region