Taking the first fibre-optic job (1982)

What the first contract actually bought

The 1982 order was unremarkable in both size and profit. It landed in a term of ¥74.5bn in sales and falling earnings, and fibre work would not move the numbers for more than a decade. What made the single contract matter was that the public corporation's certification system decided the scope of future awards by past record. For a company whose grade and permitted work types were held by its customer, taking the first site of a new method was closer to securing in advance the range of work it could bid for over the next ten years. It looks less like choosing a technology than choosing a qualification.

That qualification produced ¥200bn of orders by the year to March 1997 — and preserved the structure in which the NTT group still supplied 54.1% of sales in fiscal 2003. Moving early on fibre did not change who the customer was. And now that household coverage is targeted at 99.9% by the end of fiscal 2027, there is not much new fibre left to lay. The company's main battlefield today is not on the line that runs from the cable it first laid in August 1982.