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- "HPY" redirects here. For the airport, see Baytown Airport.
Elisa Oyj (Elisa) is a Finnish telecommunications company founded in 1882 that was known until July 2000 as HPY. Elisa Oyj employs about 3000 people and in 2007 had revenue of about €1.57 billion. The mobile operations of Elisa were previously known as Radiolinja; Elisa has a co-operation agreement with Vodafone for mobile telephony.
[edit] Technical history
HPY got started on the 6th of June 1882, by connecting 56 phone numbers. By 1884 the number of yearly calls surpassed one million.
Elisa launched the world's first commercial UMTS900 network on November 8, 2007.
[edit] 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 2008 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.[2]
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