The story
Telegraph
Telenor was established in 1855 as a state-operated monopoly provider of telegraph services and was named Telegrafverket. The initial planning for a telegraph service in Norway was launched within the Royal Norwegian Navy in 1848. By 1852, the plans were made public and the Parliament of Norway decided to plan for the construction of a telegraph system throughout the country. Televerket began by connecting Christiania (now Oslo) to Sweden (Norway was at that time in a union with Sweden) as well as Christiania and Drammen. By 1857, telegraph services had reached Bergen on the west coast via Sørlandet on the south coast, and by 1871, it had reached Kirkenes on the far north coast. Cable connections were connected to Denmark in 1867 and to Great Britain in 1869. The telegraph was important for merchant marines who could now use the electric telegraph to instantly communicate between different locations, and get an advantage from better logistics.
Telephone
The first telephone service in Norway was established in 1878 between Arendal and Tvedestrand, while the first international telephone service between Christiania and Stockholm was offered in 1893. Automation of the telephone system was started in 1920 and completed in 1985. In 1946, the first Telex service was offered. In 1976, satellite telephone connections to the Norwegian merchant navy, at the time the largest in the world, and to the oil platforms in the North Sea were established. This was the start of Inmarsat Satellite Communication which was the foundation to digitalising the telephone network between 1980–1985.
Televerket opened its first manual mobile telephone system in 1966. This was replaced with the automatic NMT system in 1981 and upgraded to the enhanced NMT-900 service in 1986. Norway was the first country to get an automatic mobile telephone system. The digital GSM system was established in 1993. The 3G/UMTS system began full operation in 2004.
Telenor and Huawei conducted a successful test of 5G with 70 Gbit/s speeds in a lab environment.
The Opera web browser was created in 1994 by Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner and Geir Ivarsøy during their tenure at Telenor. Opera Software was established in 1995, where they went on to continue the development of their browser.
Deregulation and internationalisation
The corporation changed its name to Televerket in 1969. In 1994, the company, then known as Norwegian Telecom, was established as a public corporation. The telecom sector in Norway was deregulated in stages between 1994 and 1998. An attempt to merge Telenor with its counterpart in Sweden, Telia, failed in 1999 while both still were owned by their respective governments. On 4 December 2000, the company was partially privatised and listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange and NASDAQ. This privatisation gave the company 15.6 billion kr in new capital, with the Government of Norway owning 77.7 percent of the company. As of 2014, the Norwegian government holds 53.97 percent of the Telenor shares directly and another 4.66 percent through the Government Pension Fund Norway.
In the second half of the 1990s, Telenor began mobile operations in other countries: Russia (1994), Bangladesh, Greece, Ireland, Germany and Austria (1997), Ukraine (1998), Malaysia (1999), Denmark and Thailand (2000), Hungary (2002), Montenegro (2004), Pakistan (2004), Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Serbia (2006), Myanmar (2014). Operations in Greece, Ireland and Germany were sold between 1999-2000 and profits were re-invested into emerging markets. In October 2005, Telenor acquired Vodafone Sweden, changing its name to Telenor in April 2006.
Grameenphone was Telenor's first venture in the Asian telecom market and is now the largest mobile operator in Bangladesh. Telenor holds a 55.8 percent stake of the company. Grameenphone started trading its shares on the stock exchanges in Dhaka and Chittagong on 16 November 2009. The success of Grammeenphone lead to an increased focus on Asia, with successful entries into Malaysia, Thailand, Pakistan and Myanmar. Telenor also entered the Indian market, but had to withdraw in 2017 sustaining substantial losses.
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In March 2018, Telenor sold its businesses in Southeast Europe (Bulgaria, Hungary, Montenegro and Serbia) to the PPF Group, totalling €2.8 billion in order to focus on the Nordic and Asian market.
In 2019, Telenor bought DNA, the third largest mobile operator in Finland.
On 21 June 2021, Axiata, Telenor and Digi agreed to a potential merger of Celcom and Digi to create a stronger telco in Malaysia, which was approved by both Celcom and Digi shareholders on 18 November 2022. This comes after advanced discussions two months earlier. The merged company became CelcomDigi. On completion, Axiata and Telenor held equal ownership of 33.1 percent each in the newly merged company. The merger was completed on 30 November 2022 and the company began its operations the next day.
On 22 November 2021, Telenor and Charoen Pokphand Group officially announced they have agreed to explore a US$8.6 billion merger plan between Thailand's second and third largest telecom operators by subscribers, True Corporation (TRUE) and Total Access Communication (DTAC). The proposed merger was subject to regulatory approvals. The merger was acknowledged by the regulator NBTC at a meeting on 20 October 2022. The newly merged company was founded on 1 March 2023, retaining the TRUE name and was listed on the Stock Exchange of Thailand under the ticker TRUE on 3 March 2023.
From Wikipedia’s article on Telenor, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5