Orange Polska

History

Telekomunikacja Polska was established in December 1991 as a joint stock company under the control of the State Treasury, following the split-up of the communist era state-owned PTT entity Polish Post, Telegraph and Telephone. On 1 January 1992, the company began operations under the name of 'TP SA'. The company changed its ownership structure in 1998 and began trading on the Warsaw Stock Exchange in 2000. In the same year, the Treasury sold a 35% stake in TPSA to a consortium of France Télécom and Kulczyk Holding, with the consortium increasing its stake by a further 12.5% in 2001.

On 21 December 2007, TP SA was fined PLN 75 million (approximately EUR 20.7 million) by the Office for Competition and Consumer Protection for discriminating against its competitors on the internet services market.

Full privatisation of the company was completed in May 2010.

In 2010 the company reported that they had almost 500,000 pay TV subscribers, with the number now being 695,000 (as of late 2012). The company currently serves approximately 5.6 million broadband customers.

In 2011, TP SA had a $430 million claim filed against them 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 an arbitration tribunal in Vienna. The tribunal said the company had improperly calculated what it owed DPTG for a fiber-optic transmission system the venture installed in 1991. "TP SA" 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 has not paid the first award and has filed a complaint about the arbitration, while GN has started enforcement proceedings in Poland and the Netherlands."