II. Rate Reductions and the Financial Condition of NTT East/West

The finances of NTT East and NTT West have come under increasing pressure with the shift from voice and fixed telephone to IP and mobile services, as well as introduction of competition policies of network opening, long-run incremental costing, and the MYLINE plan, etc.

Rate Reductions
During fiscal 2000, NTT (on a former single-company basis) instituted reductions in user charges and interconnection charges amounting to 290 billion yen.
For interconnection charges the rate reduction comes to 120 billion yen (or 190 billion if NTT Communications is included), because long-run incremental costing, which in the U.S. is limited to local call rates, has been introduced for interconnection charges across the board, from local to international calls. (See References 5 and 6)
For Internet access services, the charges for fixed-rate service have been drastically lowered in order to promote the IT revolution. ADSL service is now cheaper in Japan than in the U.S. (See References 3 and 4)
As a result, the financial state of the companies is critical, with operating income on a former single-company basis dropping to 12.7 billion yen.

Drastic Changes in Financial Structure
Besides the sluggishness of the overall economy as deflation proceeds,
(1) The fixed telephone market
(a) has seen a decrease in subscribers this year for analog and ISDN service combined, and
(b) has suffered a large drop in per-subscriber dialup charges due to price competition, including local call service with MYLINE introduction, and due to the shift toward mobile and IP. (See Attachment 5)
(2) In the Internet access market, meanwhile,
(a) ISDN demand has dropped off sharply with the rapid shift to ADSL and other broadband connections, and
(b) the price bottom is dropping out of the ADSL market itself due to the entry of Yahoo! BB and others.
As a result, it has become difficult to offset the drop in telephone revenue with income from Internet access services.
For these reasons the financial outlook for fiscal 2001 is that both NTT East and NTT West will suffer a year-on-year decline in income from services of around 200 billion yen, with the result that NTT East might post a loss and NTT West will suffer further losses. (See Attachment 6)
Accordingly, NTT East and NTT West will need to shore up their financial base by expanding their services into new IT related fields, etc.


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