France Télécom
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
France Télécom (Euronext: FTE, NYSE: FTE) (outside of France often spelled France Telecom, without the accents) is the main telecommunication company in France. It currently employs about 220,000 people and has nearly 90 million customers worldwide, including the French départements d'outre mer. For the last twelve months ending Sep 2004 it had revenue of 60.11 billion dollars.
The former CEO of France Télécom Thierry Breton was appointed back in 2002 after leaving his previous company Thomson SA (formerly THOMSON Multimedia SA, owner of the legendary American brand RCA) where he served as the CEO. On February 25, 2005, he has been appointed minister of finance and industries. The current CEO is Didier Lombard.
Contents |
History
Up to 1988, France Télécom was known as the Direction Générale des Télécommunications, a division of the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. It became autonomous in 1990. It ceased to be a state monopoly on January 1, 1998. Its headquarters are in Paris, place Alleray.
In 2004 France Télécom is likely to have to pay back €1 billion in alleged unlawful subsidies (in breach of state aid rules) it received from the French government, following an 18-month investigation by Mario Monti, the EC Competition Commissioner. It is understood that both France Télécom and the French government are appealing this decision.
In August of 2005 FT acquired an 80% ownership in the Spanish mobile phone company, Amena.
Subsidiaries
France Télécom operates through several divisions, like Wanadoo (first internet service provider in France, second in Europe), Orange (first mobile phone company in France) and Equant.
One of its most important subsidiaries was Telecom Argentina. In 1991, Argentina started to privatize most of it state-owned companies: Power, Water, Trains and telecommunications, just to name a few. France Telecom was given the "upper half" of the country, from the middle to the north, whereas Telefónica was given the southern part. Both companies inherited ENTel's catastrophic situation and turned it into a profitable company in just a few years. Starting of with severe downsizings, Telecom started to invest into the country, but there were little capital investments, rather, a small portion of earnings were reinvested. Years later, all of the phone network was upgraded to a state-of-the-art system, from phone centrals up to the wires going into homes. Finally the dream of many people, having their own phone line, was a reality. In the worst years of ENTel, a line activation would take many years.
Unlike many other privatized companies, Telecom got a totally destroyed and inefficient company and turned it into a working, profitable company. In contrast, the train lines (which costed the state roughly US$ 1 million a day in losses to operate 30.000km of railroads), were sold to private corporations, that cost the state US$ 1 million a day in subsidies, to operate 1.400km of railroads. Telecom also received subsidies to provide service in remote areas, and either doesn't provide service, or it just install a public phone.
France Telecom recently sold its part of the company to the Grupo Werthein.
See also
External links
- France Télécom website
- Pages jaunes – the Yellow Pages by France Télécom
- Solipsis: an open-source project developed within France Telecom Research labs
| CAC 40 companies of France | |
|---|---|
|
Accor | AGF | Air Liquide | Alcatel | Arcelor | AXA | BNP Paribas | Bouygues | Capgemini | Carrefour | Casino Guichard | Crédit Agricole | Dexia | EADS | Essilor | France Télécom | Groupe Danone | L'Oréal | Lafarge | Lagardère | LVMH | Michelin | Pernod Ricard | PSA Peugeot Citroën | PPR | Publicis | Renault | Saint-Gobain | Sanofi-Aventis | Schneider Electric | Société Générale | STMicroelectronics | SUEZ | TF1 | Thales | Thomson | Total | VINCI | Veolia Environnement | Vivendi Universal |
|
