Re-acquiring DoCoMo: undoing the 1991 split (2020)

Buying back the crown jewel to run one company again

The $39.8B (¥4.25tn) tender offer for DoCoMo — among the largest ever mounted by a Japanese company — was, at its core, a decision to reverse thirty years of deliberate decentralization. Spun off in 1991 and listed in 1998, DoCoMo had become the group’s profit engine but also its most autonomous member, answerable to its own minority shareholders. Taking it fully private let NTT fuse fixed-line and mobile into one business and optimize across the whole group — tariffs, handsets, network investment — in ways a listed subsidiary’s independent governance had made impossible. The immediate trigger was political: with the Suga government pressing for lower mobile bills, NTT could not force deep cuts on a subsidiary bound to protect outside investors, and full ownership dissolved that conflict, clearing the way for the low-cost ahamo plan.

What makes the buy-out more than a governance tidy-up is what it began. The 1991 spin-off and the 1999 holding-company split had been engineered to promote competition by scattering the group into separately listed pieces; the 2020 re-acquisition ran that logic in reverse, gathering the pieces back for the sake of unified strategy — above all the cross-group investment and technology control that IOWN demanded. The trillions were, in effect, a down-payment on becoming a single company again, a project NTT completed in 2025 by buying out NTT Data and dropping its forty-year-old name. The same instinct that had once decentralized to satisfy regulators now re-centralized to satisfy strategy — the monopoly’s scale reasserting itself against the very structure that had been built to contain it.