Telia Company

TeliaSonera AB

Company type	Public (Nasdaq Stockholm: TLSN)
ISIN	SE0000667925
Industry	Telecommunications
Founded	2003
Headquarters	Stockholm, Sweden
Key people	Lars Nyberg, CEO Tom von Weymarn, Chairman of the Board
Products	Mobile network operator, Internet services
Revenue	SEK 96.3 billion (2007)
Net income	SEK 20.3 billion (2007)
Number of employees	31,292 (2007)
Website	www.teliasonera.com

TeliaSonera AB is the dominant telephone company and mobile network operator in Sweden and Finland, and is also active in other countries in Northern, Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Spain, with a total (2007) of 106 million mobile customers. It is headquartered in Stockholm and its stocks are traded on the Stockholm Stock Exchange and on the Helsinki Stock Exchange.

Corporate history

TeliaSonera is the result of a 2002 merger between the Swedish and Finnish telecommunications companies, Telia and Sonera. This merger followed shortly after Telia's failed merger with Norwegian telecommunications company Telenor, now its chief competitor in the nordic countries.

Telia has a history as a state telephone monopoly, before privatisation. Sonera on the other hand used to have monopoly only on trunk network calls, while most (c. 75%) of local telecommunication was provided by telephone cooperatives. The separate brand names Telia and Sonera have continued to be used in the Swedish and Finnish markets respectively. Of the shares, 37 % are owned by the Swedish government, 13.2 % by the Finnish government, and the rest by institutions, companies, and private investors worldwide.

The Swedish Kungl. Telegrafverket (literally: Royal Telegraph Agency) was founded in 1853, when the first electric telegraph line was established between Stockholm and Uppsala. Sweden was one of few countries where the Bell System never got a strong hold, because Bell's invention was not patented in Sweden and a Swedish private competitor, Allmänna Telefon, was thus able to find an independent equipment supplier in Lars Magnus Ericsson. In this early competition, Telegrafverket with its brand Rikstelefon was a latecomer. However, by securing a national monopoly on long distance telephone lines, it was able with time to control and take over the local networks of quickly growing private telephone companies.

A de facto telephone monopoly position was reached around 1920, and never needed legal sanction. In 1953 the name was modernised to Televerket. On July 1, 1992 this huge government agency's regulating functions was split off into Post- och telestyrelsen (PTS), with similar functions as the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. The operation of the state radio and TV broadcast network was spun off into a company named Teracom. On July 1, 1993 the remaining telephone and mobile network operator was transformed into a government-owned shareholding company, named Telia AB. At the height of the dot-com bubble, on June 13, 2000, close to one third of Telia's shares were introduced on the Stockholm Stock Exchange, bringing solid cash to the Swedish state.

In the 1980s, Televerket was a pioneering mobile network operator with the NMT system, followed in the 1990s by GSM. Private competition in analogue mobile phone systems had already broken the telephone monopoly, and the growing internet allowed more opportunities for competititors. The most important of Telia's Swedish competitors in these areas has been Tele2. When PTS awarded four licenses for the 3rd generation mobile networks in December 2000, Telia was not among the winners, but has later established an agreement build a 3G network jointly with Tele2 using Tele2's licence.

During the 2006 Riksdag elections the new Alliance for Sweden (which subsequently won the election, to form a coalition government) stated a policy aim to sell its stake in TeliaSonera.

In the beginning of 2008 TeliaSonera announced measures to save nearly 500 millions euroes would include letting go of 2900 employees. 2000 from Sweden and 900 from Finland.

As it depends on the US company byxnet, through CogNet, Telia users suffered the Internet censorship when that company blocked the access to the leftist information web pages rebelión.org and abi.bo not only to its users but also to filials users like Telia.

TeliaSonera International Carrier now has the status as a tier 1 carrier.

Operations

TeliaSonera is now the largest Nordic and Baltic fixed voice, broadband and mobile operator by revenue and customer base. It operates Europe's largest and fastest growing wholesale IP backbone (AS1299) and is the 10th largest global mobile group by consolidated customers (including ownership stakes in Turkcell, Yoigo, Megafon, Netcom, and others).

Finland

TeliaSonera has declared that it will dismantle its countryside landline networks. However, Finland’s minister of communications, Suvi Lindén, has demanded that TeliaSonera first commit to a list of conditions pertaining to, among others, emergency calls and broadband speed.

Norway

In Norway Telia at first entered after the deregulation in 1998 as a virtual supplier of fixed telephone and Internet. This was sold to Enitel during the merger attempt with Telenor, but Telia reentered in 2000 with the purchase of one of the two mobile network operators, NetCom. In 2006 it also bought the virtual mobile provider Chess Communication and the Internet service provider NextGenTel.

See also

• List of Finnish companies
• List of Swedish companies
• Skanova
• Yoigo TeliaSonera owned 3G operator in Spain

External links

• TeliaSonera - corporate site
  • International Carrier - the international mobile, media & wholesale communications services division
  • Telia in Sweden
  • Sonera in Finland
  • Telia in Denmark
  • Netcom in Norway
• Yahoo! - TeliaSonera AB Company Profile