History
NTT was established as a government-owned corporation in 1953
Established as a monopoly government-owned corporation in 1953, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation (日本電信電話公社 Nippon Denshin Denwa Kōsha) was privatized in 1985 to encourage competition in the telecom market. In 1987, NTT was listed on stock exchanges in Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Fukuoka, Niigata, and Sapporo, and its stock was offered in an Initial Public Offering (IPO) at 1.6 million yen. The government sold 1.95 million shares of NTT. In 1988 another 1.5 million government-owned shares of NTT stock were sold. NTT was listed on the New York Stock exchange in September of 1994, and on the London Stock Exchange in October of the same year.[2]
Because NTT owns most of the infrastructure that connect individual consumers to it communications network (last mile), it enjoys oligopolistic control over land lines in Japan. In order to weaken NTT, the company was divided into a holding company (NTT) and three telecom companies (East, West, and Communications) by the NTT Law in 1998. Under this arrangement, NTT East and West provide only short distance communications, and are obligated to maintain telephone service all over Japan. NTT Communications is not regulated by the NTT Law.