Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. said Wednesday its group net profit in the April-September period fell 4.0 percent from a year earlier to 330.73 billion, yen hit by the continuing slide in fixed-line voice communications.
The telecom giant's revenue for the fiscal first half was down 2 percent to 5.23 trillion yen. During the period, revenue from fixed-line voice communications fell 5.5 percent year-on-year as customers kept changing to mobile and Internet phones, company officials said.
"We have not been able to stop this trend," NTT CEO Norio Wada told reporters. Faced with the gloomy prospects of the conventional fixed-line market, the former state-monopoly has betted its future on the fiber-optic network with an eye on attracting 30 million subscribers by the end of fiscal 2010.