Case Study France Telecom

France Telecom (FT) is a French telecommunication company. It was created in 1988 but only became a self operating company in 1991. It first had a monopolistic as it was the only phone company in France and was nationalized. Formerly the creation of France Telecom, a specific entity of the State was operating the communications for the entire population and was known as the "Direction générale des postes et des telecommunications". The France Telecom Group, with its principal subsidiaries Orange, the TP Group (the Polish telecommunications operator TP S.A. and its subsidiaries), Equant and the PageJaunes Group, offers its consumers, business customers and other telecommunications operators, a broad selection of services ranging from fixed line and wireless telephony, data transmission, Internet and multimedia services and other value-added services. France Telecom currently serves 125 million customers worldwide.
In recent years, the European market for telecommunications has grown rapidly as a result of the culmination of a number of factors: the globalization of trade, the increasing consolidation of European markets, the rapid growth of wireless telephony, the advent and growth of the Internet and the development of data exchange.
Against this background and in an increasingly competitive environment, France Telecom pursued, from 1999 to 2002, a strategy for the development of new services and accelerated its international development through external growth with the goal of reaching critical mass in high growth markets on the European level, particularly in the wireless and Internet markets. These strategic investments could not, for the most part, be financed through equity, leading to a significant increase of France Telecom's debt. Today, France Telecom has over 125 million customers worldwide and its shares are traded in Paris and New York Stock Exchange. It is not anymore a phone company but an integrated company providing internet, fixed-lined,