Nippon Telegrpah & Telephone Corp was also the focus of attention in the Structural Impediments Initiative trade talks with the US in Tokyo late last month: under pressure from the US government, the phone company could be excluded from a forthcoming project to develop Japan’s next generation of CS-4 communications ssatellite: Japan proposed that foreign satellite manufacturers be given priority in areas that use only currently available technologies, but be excluded from fields requiring development of new technologies with the threat that it would withdraw NTT from the project – but as this would mean the government shouldering the entire cost of the $650m project, the Japanese government was planning to make some concessions to reach a compromise, involving purchase of a US satellite.
