The effect of competition over the last few years in the domestic long-distance telephone market in Japan has been to reduce Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp’s market share to around 50% in the case of the lucrative Tokyo-Osaka route: three new operators, Japan Telecom Ltd, Daini Denden Corp and Teleway Japan Ltd, plan to reduce their rates by an additional 8% next month; NTT has not yet announced its own rate decreases, but has said that in-city rates, where it has no competition, will increase; the spin-off of the mobile phone division into a separate company from July is also expected to have an effect on revenues and earnings – last year, NTT released a successful range of mobile phones, called Mova, which compete with the Motorola Inc MicroTak in size, and which were manufactured by four different manufacturers including Fujitsu Ltd, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co and NEC Corp under licence; this fiscal, NTT’s pre-tax profits are expected to fall 10% to $2,887.5m, below $3,000m for the first time in five years; in the long-term, NTT pins its hopes on provision of ISDN services, and is pushing ahead with digitisation of its current network for a full-scale implementation by 1997; however there has as yet been no strong demand from the market for ISDN services and ISDN-compatible equipment such as Group IV facsimile machines are still at least double the price of Group III ones.
