With Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp shares off 85% from their all-time high – they still cost $3,654 each and were originally floated at around $7,000, the government’s plans to sell another big tranche this fiscal year look a forlorn hope: the government is at a loss over how to make NTT more attractive to investors, Reuter reports from Tokyo, but to the rest of the world, the answer seems obvious – persuade the company to pay out rather more of its profits in dividends because even at the current bombed-out price, the shares still yield only a miserly 1% or so – in the US or Europe, that’s the kind of dividend expected from a go-go pharmaceuticals company, not a bloated semi-monopoly utility; the government, which has repeatedly postponed the planned fourth sale, still holds 66% of NTT’s shares, and must retain one third by law.
