Betting on DDI: taking on the NTT telecom monopoly (1984)

How purpose bears on a venture’s fate

What sets this decision apart is that it sprang not from any financial need but from a manager with no ties to the industry staking his private wealth against a social irrationality — the high cost of telephone service. Inamori, who had raised Kyocera into a major company in fine ceramics within a single generation, set that success aside and forced his way, as a latecomer, into a market the giant NTT had monopolised. Splitting the investment and the risk among five core companies and fixing where responsibility lay, the design of a deliberately “loose confederation” was the device that let a bet too large for any one firm to shoulder stand up as a joint venture.

Even so, the public-interest banner — lowering rates to lighten the burden on ordinary citizens — and the story that he asked himself each night whether he was acting free of self-interest sit on a different plane from whether the venture would pay. New entrants have rarely survived in capital-intensive telecommunications, and DDI’s flowering into KDDI owed an undeniable amount to the tailwinds of pent-up demand for lower rates and the spread of mobile phones. This decision to pour capital and passion outside the core business leaves a heavy question for companies even today: may a management choice be judged on profit alone, and how do motive and purpose bear on whether a venture succeeds or fails?