The world’s second-biggest operator by revenues, Japan’s NTT Corporation, is making a fresh drive to acquire new business beyond its national borders, faced with a shrinking domestic market and likely restructuring of its businesses by the government. If it succeeds it will have a significant impact on the high end of the enterprise services market and the business of global operators such as BT, Orange and AT&T.
In recent months both NTT’s international networking services arm, NTT Communications (NTT Com), and its ICT solutions division, NTT Data, have made acquisitions, notably in Europe, to strengthen their enterprise services and solutions (see box p.16). “Service expansion is our target. We have the aspiration to provide global services to global MNCs,” says Takashi Ooi, vice president and senior manager of the Global Solutions Group at NTT Communications. “NTT Com as a whole group is stepping up activities into the global [arena]. This…coincides with the Group’s global strategies.”
NTT Group’s goal has been to double revenues from its global businesses between the 2007 and 2010 financial years. The move springs from the economic and demographic challenges that NTT and other large Japanese companies face in their domestic market. NTT Com’s total operating revenues fell 2.3% to 267.57 billion yen (about 2 billion) for the three months to 30 June, compared with the same period in 2008. Parent NTT Corp’s net profit for the fiscal year to March 2009 fell to ¥538.68 billion (about 4 billion) from ¥635.16 billion (about 4.7 billion) a year earlier; group revenues fell 2.5% to ¥10.416 trillion from ¥10.681 trillion.
Mobile arm NTT DoCoMo is also facing increased competition. In September, DoCoMo gained the fewest number of new mobile subscribers in the country: 66,000 compared to 108,000 for Softbank and 102,300 for KDDI. DoCoMo has a total of 55.19 million subscribers, KDDI 31.23 million and Softbank 21.32 million.
“We have to expand our revenue globally,” continues Ooi. Currently, half of NTT Com’s customers are non-Japanese companies, but it earns just 10% of its revenues outside Japan. “The ratio should be over 50% of non-Japanese companies,” says Toshio Nakai, senior manager of the global ...