Japan’s NTT Communications Corp (NTT Com) is exploring options to acquire a unified telecom licence in India, even as its sister concern NTT DoCoMo is on the verge of exiting the country.

“NTT Communications is exploring acquiring a licence for unified communications through its India subsidiary, NTT Communications India,” Sharad Sanghi, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer at Netmagic, told BusinessLine in an interaction.

NTT Com owns a 74 per cent stake in Indian data centre operator Netmagic, while the remaining 26 per cent is held by Sharad Sanghi in his personal capacity. In 2012, NTT Com had acquired the majority stake in Netmagic, which Sanghi had founded in 1998.

“Netmagic and NTT Communications India will work as one company, where we (Netmagic) will provide the data centre and managed services and they will provide the bandwidth and connectivity,” he added.

NTT Com intends to apply for the licence early next year, depending on market conditions, though a final date is yet to be fixed.

A unified licence will enable the companies to provide virtual private network and international private leased circuit services to NTT Com’s global customers.

However, NTT Com will not bid for spectrum nor provide mobile services in India.

At present, Netmagic, which already holds an ISP licence, offers IT hosting services, including cloud computing, infrastructure management application hosting and disaster recovery, among others.

NTT DoCoMo exit On the other hand, NTT DoCoMo is on the verge of selling its 26.5 per cent stake in Tata Teleservices Ltd (TTSL), exiting India five years after it entered the market. The exit — through a put option — comes after TTSL failed to achieve certain milestones specified in the agreement between the two companies.

NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s biggest telecom operator by subscribers, had acquired the stake in March 2009, in the heyday of the telecom sector, for $2.7 billion (then ₹13,070 crore).

Hiking stake Separately, NTT Com had received the Finance Ministry’s approval to increase its stake in Netmagic to 81.63 per cent. The move will result in it bringing in an additional ₹575 crore into the company, which will be used to expand its data centres. Netmagic, which already has eight data centres across Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai, is building another 2.80-lakh square feet data centre in Mumbai.

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