KPN

KPN  is a Dutch landline and mobilet elecommunications company, including both 2G and 3G mobile operations. The company is based in The Hague.
History
The company was formerly called Koninklijke PTT Nederland, and before that Staatsbedrijf der Posterijen, Telegrafie en Telefonie or PTT and was the publicly owned fixed line operator of the Netherlands. Before the spin-off of TPG, the company also controlled the national Dutch postal services. The Dutch government progressively privatised KPN beginning in 1994, reducing its stake to 6.4% in 2005 and finally to zero in 2006. It has thus given up its golden share veto rights.

In 2001 KPN tried to merge with the Belgian telco Belgacom. It did not succeed because of the unwillingness of the Belgian government. In 2001, Spanish Telefonica expressed an interest in buying KPN.

The Japanese mobile telephone company NTT DoCoMo holds a 2% stake in KPN Mobile NV. From 2002 until 2007 KPN Mobile provided i-mode services on its mobile phone networks. i-mode as introduced by KPN's E-Plus in Germany in March 2002 and by KPN Mobile The Netherlands in April 2002 was the first mobile internet service in Europe (ahead of Vodafone's V-live).

KPN partly owned KPNQwest, a telecommunications company equally owned by KPN and the American Qwest Communications International. The company was set to bring together the state-of-the-art fibre-optic networks of the two partners and the Internet services expertise and customer base of EUnet International. The company collapsed in a bankruptcy in 2002.

KPN also has operational synergies through joint ventures with TDC and Swisscom.

In 2007 KPN took over Getronics N.V., a worldwide ICT services company with more than 22,000 employees, and became almost two times its former size. KPN is still selling parts of Getronics that were not of their interest. Recently they sold a Dutch department of Getronics named Business Application Services (BAS) to CapGemini for about €250,000,000.

In the Netherlands, KPN has 6.3 million fixed-line phone customers. Its mobile division, KPN Mobile, has more than 33 million subscribers in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, France, and Spain under different brand names. Through its ownership of several EuropeanISP's, KPN also provides Internet access to 2.1 million customers, and it offers business network services and data transport throughout Western Europe

Profit   €1.797billion