The Irish business, Tele2 Telecommunications Services, was sold to Carphone Warehouse in December 2005 after deciding to pull out of the market, citing tough competition and unsatisfactory legislation.

The firm's accounts show that it made a total loss of 4.6m in the 15month period to the end of March 2006. This suggests that, if trading levels remained stable throughout the year, Tele2 potentially lost up to 3.6m in its final year in the Irish market. The firm's turnover was just 11.1m.

The company launched its Irish landline service in September 2004, offering savings of up to 77% on standard Eircom national call rates.

However, it failed to attract a sufficient number of customers to be profitable, despite headline grabbing business tactics which included transferring its Irish call centre business from India to Dublin. At the time of its sale to the Carphone Warehouse, it had 36,000 Irish subscribers.

According to the accounts, the main difficulty faced by the business was the high cost of attracting customers, which stood at almost 8m over the 15 months.

Tele2's incursion in the Irish market has been one of the few failures of the Swedish company's relentless growth strategy. Founded in 1993 after the liberalisation of Sweden's telephone market, it now has 29m customers in 22 European countries.