Vodafone Italy

Vodafone Italia
Private
Industry Mobile telecommunications
Founded 1995 as Omnitel Pronto-Italia
2003 rebranded Vodafone Italia
Headquarters Milan and Ivrea (operations) Italy, Amsterdam (legal) Netherlands
Area served
 Italy
Key people
 Paolo Bertoluzzo, CEO
Pietro Guindani, Chairman
Products Vodafone Special, Vodafone Scegli Tu Ricaricabile, Relax, Scegli Unlimited (Under 30), Smart Passport, Vodafone My Country, Mobile Internet, Rete Sicura, Vodafone YOU, Vodafone SmartPass, Vodafone Wallet - Fixed line services: Fibre, ADSL and telephone
Revenue Increase 46,4 billions £
Decrease 7 billions £
Owner Vodafone Group Plc (100%)
Number of employees
 7600
Parent Vodafone (100%)
Website www.vodafone.it

Vodafone Omnitel BV (former Omnitel Pronto-Italia, now branded Vodafone Italia) is an Italian telephony company (even though it is legally resident in the Netherlands), which has approximately 32,000,000 mobile customers with a market share of 32.8% (placing itself just behind TIM) and 2,800,000 customers on fixed lines with a market share of 7.9% (behind Telecom Italia and Infostrada). Vodafone Italia is a fully owned subsidiary of Vodafone Group plc (100.00%). In September 2013, it was announced that Vodafone would buy Verizon's stake for consideration of $3.5 billion.

Network and coverage

Vodafone Italia operates a GSM, EDGE (from summer 2011), UMTS, HSDPA, HSUPA, LTE network. As of 27 November 2014, this was Vodafone Italia's coverage:

History

In December 1995, Omnitel Pronto-Italia launched its services in Italy. Omnitel was a mobile operator and Infostrada (today owned by Wind) was a fixed-line operator. They belonged to Olivetti and represented the first telephone alternative to monopolists TIM and Telecom Italia.

Original majority owner Olivetti sold its interest in Omnitel and Infostrada to the German consortium Mannesmann (which had been a minority shareholder since 1997) after Olivetti took control of Telecom Italia, and thus TIM, in 1999. Mannesmann took control of Omnitel with a 53.7% equity stake.

The following year, Vodafone purchased Mannesmann, thus taking control of Omnitel. The Vodafone brand was introduced as Omnitel-Vodafone in 2001, made the primary brand as Vodafone-Omnitel in 2002; finally the current name Vodafone Italia was introduced in 2003, dropping "Omnitel" altogether. Vodafone Italy introduced the new Speechmark Logo only on 10 June 2007.

The company slogan varied from that of the international Vodafone campaign (Make the most of now) and was Life is NOW, but now is the same global one power to you. The company website was known as 190.it as 190 is the customer care number for Vodafone Italy. Starting from July 2008, the company URL has been changed from "190.it" to "vodafone.it". The company's spokesmodel from 1999 to 2006, for both Omnitel and Vodafone, was Australian model Megan Gale, which rose to fame thanks to these advertisings.[1]

Since taking over the company, Vodafone has introduced its suite of services in Italy, such as Vodafone live! and UTMS/HSPDA services, and has collaborated in partnership to launch of Mobile virtual network operators for other corporations.

In 2007, like in Spain, Vodafone Italy has bought the Italian branch of Tele2,[2] renaming later as TeleTu in 2010, adding fixed-line network offers.

References

  1. ↑ Un' australiana di 23 anni la ragazza dello spot con i tasti del telefonino come impronte digitali, Page 19 (16 April 1999) - by Veneziani Maria Teresa, Corriere della Sera
  2. ↑

External links