How it started
History
The company was founded on 28 December 1998 after the separation of the Croatian Post and Telecommunications (Croatian: Hrvatska pošta i telekomunikacije) into two entities: Hrvatska pošta (Croatian Post) and Hrvatski Telekom (Croatian Telecom), which started their business operations on 1 January 1999.
Government of Croatia initiated the privatization of the state-owned telecommunications company, Hrvatski Telekom, in 1998. By October 1999, Deutsche Telekom, a German company, purchased a 35% stake in Hrvatski Telekom for $850 million and acquired an additional 16% stake in 2001, becoming the majority shareholder with 51%.
In 2001, Hrvatski Telekom acquired Cronet, which was the second mobile operator in Croatia and the first to offer GSM network services in the country in 1996. Hrvatski Telekom established HT-mobilne komunikacije d.o.o. in 2002 as a separate entity dedicated to mobile services.
The company rebranded as T-HT on October 1, 2004, becoming part of the global T-family of Deutsche Telekom. This included new trademarks for two business units: T-Com for fixed network operations and T-Mobile for mobile operations.
The Croatian government transferred 7% of its shares in HT to the Fund for Croatian Homeland War Veterans and Their Families on February 17, 2005. Later that year, on October 14, 2005, Hrvatski Telekom acquired a 39.1% stake in JP HT d.d. Mostar, known as HT Eronet, from the Government of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina as part of the national telecom company's privatization process.
From Wikipedia’s article on Hrvatski Telekom, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2