Colt Group S.A. (trading as Colt, formerly COLT Telecom Group S.A.) is a multinational telecommunications, IT managed services and data centre services company headquartered in London, United Kingdom and with its registered office in Luxembourg.
1992 Colt was founded by Jim Hynes with funds provided by Fidelity Investments as City Of London Telecommunications. The company began to construct a telecoms network in London.
In 1993 it was awarded a licence to compete with British Telecom and Cable and Wireless in voice and data transmission.
1996 It was first listed on the London Stock Exchange
The group later expanded into Europe, building networks in major European cities over the next 10 years.
In 2001 Fidelity Investments helped the Company to raise a further £400m to finance its future activities.
In 2005 the company reached its first year of positive cash flow
In 2007 its had its first year of profit.
In April 2009 Colt completed an Open Offer raising €199.1m (including a €9.7m foreign exchange gain) before expenses with the issue of 211.0 million shares.
In 2010 Colt rebranded from COLT Telecom to Colt Technology Services, deleting the acronyms of City of London Telecommunications to reflect its paneuropean nature. Since then the company now describes itself as an ‘information delivery platform’ rather than a telco, to describe its move towards selling more integrated computer and network services.
In May 2011 Colt acquired a majority shareholding in MarketPrizm, a provider of low latency market data and trading infrastructure services.
See Also
Sources of Information
- [1] Wikipedia