NTT Continues to Cut Costs to Grow Earnings as It Invests in Data Centers

NTT is an anomaly in the telecom world. It owns a world-class wireless business in NTT DoCoMo, but its fixed-line business struggled to generate a decent return on investment for many years. NTT consolidated NTT DoCoMo in 2021 and its near-term strategies will focus on continuing to extract synergies from this consolidation in areas such as merging management, network synergies from the mobile business using some of NTT’s fixed-line core network and backhaul transmission, alignment of research and development activities and cross selling synergies. NTT DoCoMo has also made several decisions to significantly lower pricing, in 2014, 2019, and 2021 that had significant impact on its earnings. However, with NTT also consolidating of its international businesses with NTT Data we see further potential synergy and cost-reduction opportunities which should help offset the effects from what has been at times a difficult mobile market.