Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. announced an extraordinary loss of 41 billion yen Friday for the current 1998 business year to liquidate its nine loss-making personal handy-phone system (PHS) affiliates.
However, NTT will post 153 billion yen in net profits, up from an earlier projection of 144 billion yen, in the year to March 1999, due to reduced tax payments, according to the company.
NTT's estimated pretax profit was also revised upward to 285 billion yen from 274 billion yen, according to the firm. In May, the telecommunications giant announced they planned to liquidate nine NTT Personal group firms, which offer PHS service, after transferring their operations in December to NTT Mobile Communications Network INC., an NTT cellular phone subsidiary known as NTT DoCoMo, and NTT DoCoMo's eight group firms.
The NTT DoCoMo firms, which are divided by region, own nearly 50 percent of equity stakes in the nine PHS firms, while NTT has stakes of 28 percent in each of them.
Amid sluggish sales and intensified competition in the mobile telecommunications market, NTT Personal group firms registered a pretax loss of 93 billion yen in the 1997 business year to March.