Portions of an article from TheStreet.com:
Fez
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Markets : The Coming Week in Asia
The Coming Week in Asia: NTT Gets Global
5/21/00 4:30 AM ET
TOKYO -- Nippon Telegraph & Telephone (NTT:NYSE ADR - news - boards), Japan's largest telecom operator, is the kind of company U.S. trade authorities hate to bump heads with.
NTT, which is still 53% owned by the Japanese government, has refused to cut the rates it charges other carriers to use its lines, essentially ensuring continued monopoly status. Meanwhile, deregulation abroad allows it to expand its global reach. Lately, it has been stepping over borders to expand its telecom business into Asia, the U.S. and Europe. And while that's the kind of thing that sticks in U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky's craw, it's also one of the reasons many foreign funds have big NTT stakes.
...Meanwhile, DoCoMo is expanding its mobile empire. Earlier this month, it bought a 15% stake in Dutch mobile phone operator KPN Mobile. This purchase made a mobile phone web among Korea's SK Telecom (SKM:NYSE ADR - news - boards), Sonera (SNRA:Nasdaq ADR - news - boards) of Finland, Hong Kong's Hutchison Telecommunications, a unit of Hutchison Whampoa (HUWHY:Nasdaq ADR - news - boards), and VoiceStream Wireless (VSTR:Nasdaq - news - boards) of the U.S. Besides launching third-generation phones using the W-CDMA technology, this alliance will allow DoCoMo to launch a bid for the U.K.'s Orange, experts say.
..."As far as the market is concerned, it's good to see NTT finally in the mergers and acquisitions scene, which it has been quite absent from," says Kate Lye, analyst at Warburg Dillon Read. Lye's 12-month target for NTT is 2.61 million yen (the stock currently trades around 1.3 million) and she has a buy recommendation on the stock. (WDR currently does not have any brokering ties with NTT, but was one of the global coordinators for the sale of NTT shares last year.) |
