The story
Founded by Government of Japan on Apr 1, 1985.1
Established as a state monopoly in August 1952 to take over the Japanese telecommunications system, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation (日本電信電話公社, Nippon Denshin Denwa Kōsha; shortened into Den-Den Kōsha (電電公社)) was privatized in 1985 to encourage competition in the country's telecom market, making Japan the second country in the world (after the United States) to deregulate its telecom market. In 1987, NTT made the largest stock offering to date, at US$36.8 billion.
Because NTT owns most of Japan's last mile infrastructure (including broadband fibre connections), it has oligopolistic control over most landlines in Japan. In order to stimulate local competition, the company was divided into a holding company (NTT) and three telecom companies (NTT East, NTT West, and NTT Communications) in 1999. The NTT Law regulating NTT East and West requires them to serve only short-distance communications and obligates them to maintain fixed-line telephone service all over the country. They are also obligated to lease their unused optical fiber (dark fiber) to other carriers at regulated rates. NTT Communications is not regulated by the NTT Law.
In July 2010, NTT and South African IT company Dimension Data Holdings announced an agreement of a cash offer from NTT for Dimension Data's entire issued share capital, in £2.12bn ($3.24bn) deal.
In late 2010, NTT's Japan-to-US transpacific network reached 400 Gbit/s. In August 2011, its network capacity was expanded to 500 Gbit/s.
In 2021, Nippon Telegraph & Tel issued green bonds worth about 300 billion yen ($2.7 billion). The bonds include three tranches with maturities of 3, 5 and 10 years. The proceeds will be used for environmentally friendly projects (renewable energy, energy-efficient broadband infrastructure, etc.).
Corporate history timeline
1952 Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation established
1979 INS Concept announced
1985 Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) incorporated as a private company
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1987 NTT listed on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange
1988 NTT DATA Corporation started operations
1990 VI&P Concept announced
1992 NTT Mobile Communications Network, Inc. (presently NTT DOCOMO) started operations
1994 Basic Concept for the Coming Multimedia Age announced
1994 NTT creates the TwinVQ codec. It was later bought by Yamaha and renamed "SoundVQ". The underlying technology (TwinVQ) still lives today within the MPEG-4 audio standard.
1995 NTT DATA listed on the Second Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange
1996 21st Century R&D Vision announced
1996 NTT DATA listed on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange
1996 NTT creates the DualSpeech voice codec, however, it was never broadly available and seemingly never made it out of beta.
1997 Digitization of communications network in Japan completed
1998 Global Information Sharing Concept announced
1998 NTT DOCOMO listed on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange
1999 NTT's operations reorganized into a holding-company structure: businesses transferred to three new wholly owned subsidiaries (NTT East, NTT West, and NTT Communications)
2002 prefecture-based subsidiaries of NTT East and NTT West started operations
2002 "Vision for a New Optical Generation" announced
2004 NTT Urban Development Corporation listed on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange
2004 "NTT Group's Medium-Term Management Strategy" announced
2008 Announcement of a new Medium-Term Management Strategy: "Road to Service Creation Business Group"
2025 The rebranding of corporate identity (logo) designed by Lippincott, to commemorate 40th anniversary, and the corporate name was changed from Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation to NTT, Inc.
From Wikipedia’s article on Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5