Japan's NTT sees India business growing to $1 bn, commits investments

Japanese tech major to launch 6 additional data centres over the next 3 months

Japanese telecommunications major Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) is betting big on the India growth story as it consolidates its data centre and information technology (IT) services portfolio within India. The Japanese technology major is on course to hit the $1-billion revenue mark in India.

The company recently raised its India bets by announcing an investment of $2.5 billion in Maharashtra over the next five years. With this, the total investment by the company touched $4.5 billion.

In 2019, NTT Data announced $2 billion in investments to be spent over five years, of which nearly $1.6 billion was across data centres, submarines, and renewable energy.

Abhijit Dubey, global chief executive officer, NTT, on his maiden India visit, said India represents the highest growth in terms of geography for the services that NTT provides globally.

“India is the eighth largest in terms of revenue for NTT global business. India is in the vicinity to be a $1 billion business for us. Importantly, after Japan, India is the centre where we have the largest employee base,” he added.

NTT - between its data centre business and IT services - has 37,000 employees in India. The global headcount for this is 147,000.

India is 3-5 per cent of the $20-billion international business of NTT, which brings the numbers in the range of $700 million.

NTT Data is the largest data centre services provider in the country and is the second largest player in the IT services segment. In the data centre segment, NTT Data’s market share is 22 per cent.

Growth driver

The company currently has 11 operational data centres, with six more to be added and three under construction.

Edge will be the next growth frontier for NTT. The company is also coming up with Edge data centres in cities like Kolkata, Pune, Nagpur, and Lucknow.

“The demand for data centre services has been increasing. Nearly 70 per cent of the capacity of these data centres has already been pre-booked,” added Sharad Sanghi, managing director, NTT India.

In an important development, the company said that by the end of this year, India will have a submarine cable, called Mist, which will land in Mumbai and Chennai and will connect data centres in India to Myanmar, Singapore, and Malaysia.

“This is for the first time that a marine cable landing station will be at a data centre too,” said Dubey.