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DoCoMo 'to sell $8B stock'
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January 11, 2001: 5:18 a.m. ET
Report: Japan cellular giant to raise money to pay for AT&T Wireless stake
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LONDON (CNNfn) - Japan's NTT DoCoMo will on Friday start marketing 460,000 new shares that it's selling to raise ¥900 billion ($7.7 billion), a report said Thursday.
The country's largest mobile-phone company will use the proceeds to finance its $9.8 billion investment in AT&T Wireless, a unit of U.S. telecommunication company AT&T Corp. (T: Research, Estimates), the Financial Times reported.
The issue is the latest of a long line equity and debt offerings in the telecom sector, and comes ahead of France Telecom SA's (PFTE) expected sale of between  7 billion and 8 billion ($6.7 billion to $7.6 billion) in shares in its flotation of Orange, Europe's second-biggest mobile-phone operator.
DoCoMo spokeswoman Yuki Isono told CNNfn.com that the company was looking at the best way to finance its AT&T Wireless, investment and was considering bank loans as well as raising cash from the sale of stock. Isono declined to comment further on the newspaper article.
DoCoMo's underwriters – Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Nikko Salomon Smith Barney Ltd. -- would begin marketing the new shares in the United States and Europe on Friday and in Japan on Monday, the FT said.
But shares in telecom companies – even mobile-phone operators – have lost the must-buy status they enjoyed in the first half of 2000. In recent months investors shed some of their earlier optimism about the money-spinning potential of next-generation cell-phone networks, while waking up to the high costs involved in developing the new services.
Other telecom companies expected to tap the equity markets this year include British Telecommunications PLC (BT-A), Royal KPN NV of the Netherlands and Verizon of the U.S.
Shares in DoCoMo have fallen more than 35 percent in the past month in anticipation of the glut of extra stock that the new share sale would bring to the market. The stock fell 3.5 percent to close at ¥1.95 million on Thursday.
DoCoMo President Keiji Tachikawa has said the carrier aims to fund its overseas expansion plans initially through loans, which it would then repay by issuing bonds or equity.
DoCoMo plans to borrow a total of ¥1.2 trillion from five Japanese banks -- the Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi, the Industrial Bank of Japan, Dai-ichi Kangyo Bank, Fuji Bank and Sumitomo Bank – according to a company statement filed at the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission this week.
Each bank will extend loans of up to ¥240 billion for the period from Jan. 5, 2001 to Dec. 28, 2001.
--from staff and wire reports 
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NTT DoCoMo
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