Finland Steamship Company (, abbreviated FÃÂ A, , abbreviated SHO) was a Finnish shipping company founded in 1883 by Captain Lars Krogius. In Finnish and Swedish, the company was usually referred to simply as FÃÂ A. In 1976, the company changed its name to Effoa, a phonetic spelling of the abbreviation FÃÂ A.
The company was a founding member of the Silja Line consortium. In 1975 FÃÂ A founded Finncarriers together with Finnlines as a joint freight operations venture. At the same time FÃÂ A gave up passenger traffic between Finland and Germany, the ships used on the route were sold to Finnlines. In the 1980s both Finncarriers and Finnlines became fully owned subsidiaries of Effoa. In 1989 Effoa decided to give up its freight-carrying operations, and its shares of Finnlines were transferred to Effoa's owners. Effoa stopped trading as an independent company in 1990 when its freight operations were demerged to form an independent Finnlines, while the passenger operations were merged with Johnson Line (the other partner in Silja Line at the time) to form EffJohn.
In 1945, FÃÂ A was the first company post-World War II to restart passenger traffic between Helsinki and Stockholm, using . The same ship was also the first to start passenger traffic between Helsinki and Tallinn after World War II in 1965.