Elisa Oyj is a Finnish

Finland

Finland , officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.Around 5.4 million people reside...

 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

Radiolinja

Radiolinja was a Finnish GSM operator founded on September 19, 1988. On March 27, 1991, the world's first GSM phone call was made on Radiolinja's network...

; Elisa has a co-operation agreement with Vodafone

Vodafone

Vodafone Group Plc is a global telecommunications company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is the world's largest mobile telecommunications company measured by revenues and the world's second-largest measured by subscribers , with around 341 million proportionate subscribers as of...

 for mobile telephony.

Technical history

HPY got started on 6 June 1882, by connecting 56 phone numbers. By 1884 the number of yearly calls surpassed one million.

Elisa launched the first commercial GSM service in 1991 and the world's first commercial UMTS900

Universal Mobile Telecommunications System

Universal Mobile Telecommunications System is a third generation mobile cellular technology for networks based on the GSM standard. Developed by the 3GPP , UMTS is a component of the International Telecommunications Union IMT-2000 standard set and compares with the CDMA2000 standard set for...

 network on November 8, 2007.

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

Cooperative

A cooperative is a business organization owned and operated by a group of individuals for their mutual benefit...

 telephone operator

Telephone operator

A telephone operator is either* a person who provides assistance to a telephone caller, usually in the placing of operator assisted telephone calls such as calls from a pay phone, collect calls , calls which are billed to a credit card, station-to-station and person-to-person calls, and certain...

s. The company reached its current geographical operating field in 1958. The original form of incorporation, a mutual

Mutual organization

A mutual, mutual organization, or mutual society is an organization based on the principle of mutuality. Unlike a true cooperative, members usually do not contribute to the capital of the company by direct investment, but derive their right to profits and votes through their customer relationship...

 association

Voluntary association

A voluntary association or union is a group of individuals who enter into an agreement as volunteers to form a body to accomplish a purpose.Strictly speaking, in many jurisdictions no formalities are necessary to start an 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 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.