| Type | Public (BIT: TIS) |
|---|---|
| Industry | Communications and Media |
| Founded | January 1998 |
| Headquarters | Cagliari, Italy |
| Key people | Vittorio Serafino (Chairman), Mario Rosso (CEO), Renato Soru (Founder) |
| Products | Communications |
| Website | tiscali.com |
Tiscali s.p.a. (BIT: TIS) is an Italian telecommunications company, based in Cagliari, Sardinia, that provides internet and telecommunications services to its domestic market. It previously had operations in other European nations through its acquisition of many smaller European Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the late 1990s, but in subsequent years these have been divested.
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Tiscali was formed in 1998 by Renato Soru when the Italian telecommunications market was deregulated. Its name is formed from a 2000-year-old nuragic village situated in Sardinia.[1] The company's original priority was internet access.
During the dot-com boom Italian stock exchange asked Renato Soru to make an IPO and join the stock exchange. On October 1999 Tiscali entered the Italian Stock Exchange, 1 stock was sold for 46 Euro. The company acquired, in quick succession, World Online (The Netherlands), Liberty Surf (France) and LineOne (UK), instantly giving it market presence in those countries. This made it the third largest Internet Service Provider in Europe, with presence in most European countries.
Its founder, Renato Soru, ran for elections as governor of Sardinia in 2004 and subsequently left Tiscali after appointing a new CEO, Ruud Huisman.
Ruud Huisman was chosen by Soru as CEO of Tiscali. Huisman sold some assets, but after a year he left the company following disagreements with the board. Tommaso Pompei followed as head, deciding in November 2007 on a new industrial plan 2008-2012, but on February 2008 he resigned as CEO. Mario Rosso was chosen as CEO of Tiscali to restructure the company's debt and he was CEO for 1 year.
In February 2009, Soru lost elections for a second term and he decided to come back to Tiscali as CEO.
In March 2009, Tiscali asked banks to postpone the payment of interest of debts following a failure to sell Tiscali UK to BSkyB.[2] In June 2009 the UK branch was sold to The Carphone Warehouse and merged into its TalkTalk operations.[3] In September 2009, to avoid bankruptcy, the board decided to reverse the 10:1 stock split and increase capital by 180 million Euro.
As of 2009, Tiscali operates only in its home market.[4]
Each of Tiscali's regional companies offer many services, which may include broadband internet access and telephone services. Tiscali SpA briefly operated an IPTV service in Italy (available in the cities of Bologna, Cagliari, Florence, Genoa, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Rome, Turin and Trieste) from 11 December 2007. Its UK television service, Tiscali TV was acquired by TalkTalk in 2009 as previously mentioned.
Tiscali's former Carrier Company, Tiscali International Network, is a pure play carrier business delivering wholesale services including Global IP Connectivity, MPLS lines, Voice over IP and Network Monitoring.[5] As of May 2009 Tinet's IP/MPLS backbone counts 90 POPs and extends over 17 European countries and across the United States and Hong Kong. Its Autonomous Systems (AS3257) is a core ASN in the global Internet routing table, as well as the largest IPv6 backbone outside Asia. The network was sold to the Italian private equity firm BS Private Equity SpA on 27 May 2009, and renamed Tinet.
Tiscali ran similar web portals for each of its countries, which include features such as webmail, reviews, news, videos, dating, chat, radio, TV guide, streaming TV channels and others.
Tiscali 10.0 was Tiscali's integrated self-branded web browser, which was distributed with its dial-up Internet packages. It was produced by UltraBrowser Inc, and used Microsoft's Internet Explorer Trident rendering engine to display web pages. Since Tiscali's corporate re-branding exercise in 2004, the software has not been included in broadband installation packs as it features Tiscali's original logo and design layout, and generally was designed for those with dial-up packages. Its version number was matched to that of UltraBrowser's most recent version of their own browser.
Beginning in 2004, Tiscali sold off many of its regional sub-companies to native telecommunications operators in order to focus more on prime target areas.
On 31 December 2009:
Today the shareholders of Tiscali are: