Ntt, C & W Tie Up

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp said it has linked up with a unit of Britain's Cable and Wireless Plc in undersea cable operations in Asia to tap growing demand for telecom services. NTT president Junichiro Miyazu said NTT and C&W's wholly owned unit, Cable & Wireless Marine Ltdsigned an agreement to cooperate in undersea cable operations in the seas around Japan and other Asian countries.

C&W Marine's strong expertise in cable engineering, its marketing ability and a strong presence in Asia will be beneficial to us," Miyazu told a news conference. C&W Marine, headquartered in Essex in Britain, is one of the world's biggest undersea cable engineering firms, owning 14 cable-laying ships. NTT will spin off its small undersea cable section to form a wholly owned unit by the end of March. C&W Marine will later acquire a 25 percent stake in the new unit through a third-party allocation, Miyazu said. Besides laying undersea communications cable, the unit will begin offering cable engineering maintenance and consulting services in July, Miyazu said. The alliance will lead the way for NTT and C&W Marine to jointly bid for contracts to lay cables in the future, he said. Miyazu expects emerging multimedia services to boost demand for large-capacity undersea cables in Asia. "Now that NTT is allowed to move into international operations, we hope to move aggressively into the Asian market and meet strong demand for undersea cables," he said. Miyazu, however, ruled out a possibility of expanding the cooperative relationship with C&W Marine to other business areas or to forming a partnership with parent C&W. "We have no plan so far to expand cooperation into other areas," he said. The Japanese telephone giant has been on the sidelines during the latest wave of mergers and acquisitions in the industry globally and has said it intends to stay there.