Blast from the past: Telegram.nl acquires Swiss telex company

I saw this on the news yesterday and thought it deserved an article here. The company called Telegram.nl started out in the nineties, taking over the telegram business of KPN (big Dutch telco) in 2001 and here’s the news they have acquired a Swiss telex company. The company is called SwissTelex, and with the acquisition Telegram.nl now holds one third of the international telex market. I didn’t even know there was still a telex market! Let alone one could make money with it.

Apparently, there are quite some businesses that depend heavily on telexes, or even require them to operate in a normal fashion.
Millions of telexes are still sent every month worldwide: industries depending on them include the oil business, which in some countries suffers from bad internet connections. Email would not be the answer then: telex networks are more reliable. Another industry that is making heavy use of telexes and telegrams is the legal business: because of the importance of the messages and cases involved, timing and confirmed reception of the messages is of the utmost importance.
I never thought I’d say this, but there’s still one (apparently underappreciated or too unknown to the broad audience?) communications tool that serves businesses in some areas better than email. That’s ok: them old school can have that corner of the world – we’ll have the rest!
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