The story
The company was founded by A-Pressen in 1999 but sold to Idar Vollvik in 2002. He merged the company with the operator Sense that was owned by Reitangruppen, who also received a partial ownership in Chess. In 2006 Vollvik sold Chess to the Swedish multinational TeliaSonera for NOK 1.6 billion. The largest loser in the deal was Telenor who lost an estimated NOK 600–800 million per year in income because Chess moved their customers from the Telenor network to the TeliaSonera owned NetCom network. The company was deleted from the Register of Business Enterprises on 11 November 2011 after its merger with Telia Company, and continued as a discount brand from then until June 2018, when Telia closed down the brand and migrated all customers to the Telia network.
From Wikipedia’s article on Chess Communication, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4