Foreca

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Foreca is a Finnish company for weather forecasts , the first Finnish private company of its kind, and is now considered the largest in the Nordic countries .

history

In Finland, the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI), which is subordinate to the Ministry of Transport and Communications, had a monopoly on the weather service until in 1996 private companies were given the opportunity to acquire and market weather data from state institutes.

Foreca, founded in 1996 under the name Weather Service Finland , was the first Finnish private company to compete with the FMI's commercial offerings, using FMI data that was not obtained directly from the FMI but from the Swedish Meteorological Institute (SMHI ) acquired. When the FMI temporarily only supplied satellite images of deliberately reduced quality to the SMHI in 1999 in order to give its own high-quality images a market advantage over private competition, Foreca, as the buyer of the SMHI, lodged a complaint with the Finnish antitrust authority (FCA) - with the success that the FCA imposed a fine on the FMI in 2002 for abuse of a dominant market position.

Foreca - as the initiator of the AEDUE (Association of Environmental Data Users of Europe) founded in November 1999 and renamed the Association of Private Meteorological Services (PRIMET) in September 2003, to which 36 companies from 16 European countries now belong - is also politically responsible for the association Unrestricted access to government weather data across the EU.

Weather Service Finland was renamed Foreca Oy ( Foreca Ltd ) in 2001 based on the English word for forecast, forecast . The company's head office is in Helsinki , with the Swedish branch Foreca Sverige AB in Stockholm since 2001 . Since the beginning of 2007 the subsidiary Foreca Consulting Ltd has been responsible for research and product development.

Foreca offers global weather services in a total of 25 languages ​​in traditional media ( newspapers , radio , television ), on the Internet and as wireless data services on mobile phones . Major customers and cooperation partners include Microsoft , AOL , Nokia and Google .

swell

  1. ^ Finnish Meteorological Institute fined for abuse of dominant position : Press release of the Finnish Competition Authority (FCA), January 23, 2002

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