Tiscali
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| Type | Public (BIT: TIS) |
|---|---|
| Industry | Communications and Media |
| Founded | January 1998 |
| Headquarters | Cagliari, Italy |
| Key people | Vittorio Serafino (Chairman), Mario Rosso (CEO), Renato Soru (Founder) |
| Products | Communications |
| Website | tiscali.com |
Tiscali s.p.a. (BIT: TIS) is an Italian telecommunications company, based in Cagliari, Sardinia, that provides internet and telecommunications services to its domestic market. It previously had operations in other European nations through its acquisition of many smaller European Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the late 1990s, but in subsequent years these have been divested.
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[edit] History
[edit] Soru 1998-2004
Tiscali was formed in 1998 by Renato Soru when the Italian telecommunications market was deregulated. Its name is formed from a 2000-year-old nuragic village situated in Sardinia.[1] The company's original priority was internet access.
During the dot-com boom Italian stock exchange asked Renato Soru to make an IPO and join the stock exchange. On October 1999 Tiscali entered the Italian Stock Exchange, 1 stock was sold for 46 Euro. The company acquired, in quick succession, World Online (The Netherlands), Liberty Surf (France) and LineOne (UK), instantly giving it market presence in those countries. This made it the third largest Internet Service Provider in Europe, with presence in most European countries.
Its founder, Renato Soru, ran for elections as governor of Sardinia in 2004 and subsequently left Tiscali after appointing a new CEO, Ruud Huisman.
[edit] Subsequent CEOs
Ruud Huisman was chosen by Soru as CEO of Tiscali. Huisman sold some assets, but after a year he left the company following disagreements with the board. Tommaso Pompei followed as head, deciding in November 2007 on a new industrial plan 2008-2012, but on February 2008 he resigned as CEO. Mario Rosso was chosen as CEO of Tiscali to restructure the company's debt and he was CEO for 1 year.
[edit] Soru's return 2009
In February 2009, Soru lost elections for a second term and he decided to come back to Tiscali as CEO.
In March 2009, Tiscali asked banks to postpone the payment of interest of debts following a failure to sell Tiscali UK to BSkyB.[2] In June 2009 the UK branch was sold to The Carphone Warehouse and merged into its TalkTalk operations.[3] In September 2009, to avoid bankruptcy, the board decided to reverse the 10:1 stock split and increase capital by 180 million Euro.[citation needed]
As of 2009, Tiscali operates only in its home market.[4]
[edit] Services
Each of Tiscali's regional companies offer many services, which may include broadband internet access and telephone services. Tiscali SpA briefly operated an IPTV service in Italy (available in the cities of Bologna, Cagliari, Florence, Genoa, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Rome, Turin and Trieste) from 11 December 2007. Its UK television service, Tiscali TV was acquired by TalkTalk in 2009.
Tiscali's former Carrier Company, Tiscali International Network, is a pure play carrier business delivering wholesale services including Global IP Connectivity, MPLS lines, Voice over IP and Network Monitoring.[5] As of May 2009 Tinet's IP/MPLS backbone counts 90 POPs and extends over 17 European countries and across the United States and Hong Kong. Its Autonomous Systems (AS3257) is a core ASN in the global Internet routing table, as well as the largest IPv6 backbone outside Asia. The network was sold to the Italian private equity firm BS Private Equity SpA on 27 May 2009, and renamed Tinet.
Tiscali ran similar web portals for each of its countries, which include features such as webmail, reviews, news, videos, dating, chat, radio, TV guide, streaming TV channels and others.
Tiscali 10.0 was Tiscali's integrated self-branded web browser, which was distributed with its dial-up Internet packages. It was produced by UltraBrowser Inc, and used Microsoft's Internet Explorer Trident rendering engine to display web pages. Since Tiscali's corporate re-branding exercise in 2004, the software has not been included in broadband installation packs as it features Tiscali's original logo and design layout, and generally was designed for those with dial-up packages. Its version number was matched to that of UltraBrowser's most recent version of their own browser.
[edit] Sales and acquisitions
Beginning in 2004, Tiscali sold off many of its regional sub-companies to native telecommunications operators in order to focus more on prime target areas.
- On 16 August 2004, Tiscali disposed of its Austrian branch, Tiscali Österreich GmbH, to Nextra Telecom GmbH.
- On 20 August 2004, Tiscali disposed of its South African branch, Tiscali (Pty), to MWEB Holdings (Pty) Ltd.
- On 23 August 2004, Tiscali disposed of its Norwegian branch, Tiscali AS, to Telenor Telecom Solutions.
- On 30 August 2004, Tiscali disposed of its Swedish counterpart, Tiscali AB, to Spray Network AB, then a subsidiary of Lycos.
- On 16 September 2004, Tiscali disposed of its Swiss counterpart, Tiscali AG, reaching an agreement with Smart Telecom.
- On 19 October 2004, Tiscali sold its South African mobile telephone network, Tiscali Mobile, to Vodacom.
- On 29 November 2004, Tiscali disposed of its Belgian subsidiary, Tiscali N.V, reaching an agreement with
- On 1 February 2005, Tiscali sold its Danish company, Tiscali Denmark A/S, to Tele2.
- On 5 May 2005, Tiscali sold the French ISP, Liberty Surf to Telecom Italia.[7]
- On 31 January 2007, Tiscali disposed of its German business to consumer activities to Freenet.de AG, at a sum of €30 million.[8] It later sold its business to business transactions on 5 February 2007 to Ecotel Communication AG, with future intentions to leave the German market altogether.[9]
- On 19 June 2007, Tiscali disposed of its Dutch branch, Tiscali BV, to Royal KPN NV.[10]
- On 11 October 2006, Tiscali announced that it was to focus on the UK and Italy as its prime ISP targets, with plans to introduce new services to them including a mobile network operator and new IPTV products to the United Kingdom by its acquisition of Homechoice.[11]
- On 31 December 2008, Tiscali shut down its IPTV service in Italy.[12]
- On 27 May 2009, Tiscali sold its International arm, Tinet to BS Private Equity firm.[13]
- On 30 June 2009, Tiscali sold its UK subsidiary to The Carphone Warehouse following regulatory approval from the European Union.[14] The service was rebranded as TalkTalk in January 2010.[15]
[edit] Financial and economic data
On 31 December 2009:
- 744 workers
- there are 1,861,473,919 common shares of Tiscali
- 570,000 adsl customers of Tiscali
[edit]
Today the shareholders of Tiscali are:
- Renato Soru 17.788% of shares
- Ignis asset management limited 4.886%
- Norges Bank 2.1%
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Tiscali - Our History
- ^ Investors.tiscali.com
- ^ Carphone to purchase Tiscali UK
- ^ Blogspot.com
- ^ Tiscali Network
- ^ Tiscali - 2004 milestones.
- ^ Tiscali - 2005 milestones.
- ^ Tiscali - Disposal of B2C activities in Germany
- ^ Tiscali - Disposal of B2B activities in Germany.
- ^ Tiscali disposes of Netherlands branch
- ^ Telecom Paper - Tiscali to focus on UK, Italy; plans net profit from 2008.
- ^ Tiscali powers down IPTV service.
- ^ Tiscali International Network Acquisition Concluded By BS Private Equity.
- ^ Update 1 - Carphone wins EU approval for Tiscali UK buy Reuters.com. 30 June 2009
- ^ Tiscali TV rebrands as TalkTalk.
