NEW YORK-NTT Mobile Communications Networks Inc. plans to raise $18.4 billion when its 545,000-share initial public offering begins trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Oct. 22.
The carrier, which does business as NTT DoCoMo, has a 57-percent share of Japan’s 36.5 million wireless telephony customers.
Its IPO, second in size only to that of its parent, Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp., will give NTT DoCoMo the largest market capitalization of any wireless telecommunications carrier in the world.
NTT DoCoMo plans to issue 327,000 new shares of stock for sale in Japan. Nippon Telegraph & Telephone will offer separately 218,000 of its NTT DoCoMo shares. About 30 percent of DoCoMo is to be sold, and the parent company’s stake in the wireless carrier will decline to 67 percent from 95 percent after the IPO.
Of the total shares on offer, 70 percent are being sold to institutional and individual investors in Japan, 12 percent to institutional investors in Canada and the United States and 18 percent to institutional investors in other countries.
Goldman Sachs International and Nikko Securities Co. are lead underwriters for the offering.
NTT DoCoMo plans to use proceeds of the stock sale to repay debt, make loans to its subsidiaries and to invest in the next-generation wideband Code Division Multiple Access network it hopes to have ready for commercial service by 2000.
Junichiro Miyazu, president of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, said the parent company is considering measures to distribute profits raised through its sale of NTT DoCoMo shares.
