Understand any stock in simple English
Enter a ticker to learn what the company does and how it makes money.
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation
NTT runs Japan's phone and internet networks and sells IT services to businesses and consumers.
NTT is Japan's telephone and internet giant. It owns the fixed-line network that much of the country's broadband runs on, sells mobile phone service through its NTT Docomo brand, and provides computer systems, cloud services, and network equipment to businesses. If you live in Japan, there's a good chance the internet coming into your home and the phone in your pocket both travel over NTT's wires and airwaves.
The company is really a family of businesses under one roof. The domestic telecom arm handles phone lines, fiber broadband, and mobile service for ordinary households. A separate data center and IT services arm sells computing power and systems integration to big companies and the government, and it has been growing fast as businesses move their operations to the cloud. There's also a global division that serves multinational corporate customers, and NTT sells telecom equipment too. What makes NTT unusual is its history. It began as a state monopoly, was privatized in the 1980s, and remains one of the largest companies in Japan. It still pays steady dividends and has been buying back its own shares, returning cash to investors rather than sitting on it. The mobile arm, Docomo, is the crown jewel — a huge, reliable stream of subscription revenue that funds the rest of the group's ambitions. The business faces real pressure. Japan's population is shrinking, so the pool of domestic phone customers isn't growing, and regulators keep pushing for lower prices. That's why NTT is betting on data centers and business IT services abroad, where growth is faster. It's a slow-moving giant, but a deeply entrenched one — competitors like KDDI and SoftBank fight over the same Japanese customers, and NTT's network gives it a head start that's hard to erase.
For a company this big, the simple story is this: NTT collects reliable monthly fees from millions of Japanese households and businesses, then uses that dependable cash to expand into the faster-growing business of running computers and data for companies around the world.
Saved answer · last researched 12 Nov 2026