Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp is fighting proposals to dismember it by announcing plans to invest a daunting $59,000m over the next five years to expand and improve its telecommunications services, with the money going into speeding the rate of installation of digital exchanges, expanding its cellular network and offering new value-added services; although it intends to reduce its workforce overall by 50,000, it plans a major increase in research and development, upping annual spending to $2,000m and increasing its research staff levels to 10,000 from the present 6,200 – all of which may impress subscribers and the government but will not go down too well with the poor dupes seduced by the government into buying the shares – because the programme means that while turnover is budgeted to grow 16% over the period, profits, says the company, will likely be no better than flat.
