Passage in Prague museum The company was established as
Elektra on 18 January 1921 and renamed Tesla on 7 March 1946. A founding ceremony took place on 10 August 1946 at the Mikrofon Factory in Strašnice attended by government ministers from
Czechoslovakia and
Yugoslavia. It was named after the pioneer scientist
Nikola Tesla, who briefly studied in Prague, but when the association with a
Serbian American became politically inconvenient it was explained as abbreviation from , which means "low-current technology". Tesla had several production locations, including those at
Liptovský Hrádok,
Hradec Králové,
Pardubice,
Žďár nad Sázavou,
Bratislava, and
Nižná. Some of them became independent state-owned companies. After the
fall of communism in Czechoslovakia, Tesla struggled to compete with firms at home and abroad, which resulted in dramatic downsizing and privatization of the majority of its stores and production facilities. Tesla's logo is a rare sight in the present-day
Czech Republic and
Slovakia, as only a few of its subsidiaries have survived. One of its former subsidiaries, the Slovak JJ Electronic in
Čadca is known for its production of
vacuum tubes and SEV Litovel produces high-end
turntables for the Austrian
Pro-Ject company. The company name survived as Tesla a.s., a private company whose shares trade on the
Prague stock exchange. Tesla a.s. manufactures of radio and security equipment for military and commercial use. Tesla a.s. took a series of legal cases against the American company
Tesla, Inc. (formerly Tesla Motors, Inc.), resulting in an agreement in October 2010, establishing a coexistence of Tesla trademarks and regulating relationships between the two companies. After a three-year period in which an Irish-owned financial company was the majority shareholder in Tesla a.s. a controlling interest was acquired by Inter-Sat Ltd of
Brno in 2011. Tesla a.s. sells
set-top boxes, antennas, robotic vacuum cleaners, soundbars, motion detectors and multifunctional pressure cookers. In 2015 the company added batteries for home and industrial use to its product range. In 2022, the majority shareholder of Tesla a.s. became the international group IC Group, which secured the transaction for
The Royal Invest Fund of Kelantan founded by Sultan
Muhammad V of Kelantan. ==Products==