NEW YORK-Through an underwriting syndicate led by Salomon Smith Barney, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. plans to sell up to 982,000 shares of stock, the Japan Ministry of Finance announced late last month.
The sale, which is to include 131,000 shares sold in the United States and Canada, will be the fifth since NTT’s privatization began at least 10 years ago. It would reduce the federal government’s 59-percent stake in the carrier to about 53 percent.
In conjunction with the share offering announcement, NTT announced Oct. 25 it is considering plans to cut its overall work force by 24,000 to about 200,000 by March 2003. The company also intends to reduce annual capital spending “on a group basis” by about $23 billion through March 2003, Reuters reported.
NTT is the parent of NTT Mobile Communications, known as NTT DoCoMo, which went public a year ago and is Japan’s largest wireless carrier.
Meanwhile, the country’s fourth-largest wireless provider, Japan Telecom Co., plans to sell within a year an undisclosed stake in two cellular phone companies, in order to finance upgrades to third-generation standards, according to Bloomberg News.
Tokyo-based Japan Telecom Co., which is 30-percent owned by AT&T Corp. and British Telecommunications plc, holds interests ranging from 20 percent to 30 percent in the J-Phone Group of nine cellular carriers. It plans to sell on stock exchanges in Japan shares of J-Phone Tokyo Co., which has just more than 2 million subscribers, and J-Phone Tokai Co., which has about 1.5 million customers.
Japan Telecom estimated it needs about $5.6 billion to develop next-generation wireless phones. By March, the Japanese carrier will own 54 percent of IMT-2000 Planning Corp., a joint venture with BT and the AirTouch International unit of Vodafone AirTouch plc, whose purpose is to devise the new handsets.
