History
Telekomunikacja Polska was established in December 1991 as a joint stock company of the State Treasury, following the division of the communist era state-owned entity 'Polish Post, Telegraph and Telephone'. On January 1 1992, the company was established under the name of 'TPSA', and changed its ownership structure in 1998. The company was introduced to the Warsaw Stock Exchange in 2000. In the same year, the Treasury sold a 35% stake in TPSA to a consortium of France Telecom and Kulczyk Holding, with the consortium increasing its stake by a further 12.5% in 2001.
On 21 December 2007 Telekomunikacja Polska was fined PLN 75 million (approximately EUR 20.7 million) by the Polish Office for Competition and Consumer Protection, for discriminating against its competitors on the Internet services market.
The full privatisation of the company was completed in May 2010.
In 2010, the company also announced that they were nearing 500,000 pay TV subscribers, and has 600,000 as of 2011. It currently serves approximately 5.6 million broadband customers.
In 2011 TPSA had a $430 million claim filed against then by GN Store Nord (GN), which owns 75% of DPTG, in the second phase of an arbitration trial. Bloomberg reported that, "DPTG won a 2.2 billion-krone award in September at the Arbitration Tribunal in Vienna. The tribunal said Telekomunikacja Polska SA had improperly calculated what it owed DPTG for a fiber-optic transmission system the venture installed in 1991. "TPSA" owed payments based on data traffic over the network. The companies disagreed over how to measure the traffic and spent nine years in arbitration. The September award covered traffic from 1994 to 2004, and the new claim refers to 2004 to 2009. TPSA hasn’t paid the first award and has filed a complaint over the arbitration, while GN has started enforcement proceedings in Poland and the Netherlands."
On 16 April 2012, Telekomunikacja Polska was renamed Orange Polska, in line with France Télécom's international telecommunications branding.
Read more about this topic: Orange Polska
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