NEW YORK-NTT Mobile Communications Networks Inc. sold the second-largest initial public offering in history Oct. 22, raising $18.4 billion as its stock began trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp. sold one-third of its stake in the wireless carrier, which does business as NTT DoCoMo. DoCoMo controls 57 percent of the 36.5 million wireless telephony customers in Japan.
In December, NTT DoCoMo will pay $3.5 billion to buy from its parent company the unprofitable NTT Personal Communications Network Group, which markets the personal handyphone system.
“PHS has been competing with cellular phones, but we will change our strategy,” Keiji Tachikawa, president of NTT DoCoMo, said at a news conference held the same day his company went public.
Although PHS phones cost less to use than cellular phones, they are designed for low-mobility communications covering comparatively small geographic areas. With cellular phone prices dropping due to increased competition, wireless customers increasingly have opted for them instead of PHS.
However, PHS phones work better than cellular phones for data transmission, which Tachikawa said NTT DoCoMo would begin to emphasize. The carrier soon will introduce discount rates for customers with both PHS and cellular phones and will soon offer a dual-mode handset that can switch from cellular to PHS usage, he said.
