U.S.-JAPAN TRADE : Bloomberg Charges Unfair Trade by NTT : Complaint: A proposed 83% price hike by Nippon Telephone would favor a subsidiary, the financial information firm says.

Reflecting an increasingly hardball approach by U.S. firms in Japan, financial information company Bloomberg filed an unfair-trade complaint Wednesday against telecommunications giant Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp.

In documents filed with Japan’s Fair Trade Commission, Bloomberg charged that a proposed 83% price hike for local digital telephone service “constitutes an unfair competitive practice” that will hurt its business--which has been rapidly expanding--and help an NTT subsidiary.

“We’ve been trying to negotiate with NTT and do this the Japanese way, and it hasn’t really worked,” Ian Fallmann, general manager of Bloomberg’s Tokyo office, said at a news conference, explaining why Bloomberg decided to go public with its complaint over NTT’s planned price hike.

NTT spokesman Hiroshige Seko countered that “there is no problem of fair trade” because NTT, which is 60% owned by the Japanese government, is simply rationalizing its prices. Under the current price structure, long-distance fees are much higher than NTT’s cost and local fees are much lower than cost, he said. The proposed changes will simply rectify this imbalance and will be favorable to about 80% of all customers, he said.

“We have no intention to help our subsidiary,” Seko said.

For years, however, some U.S. firms have charged that when one set of barriers to their activities in Japan is removed, other obstacles pop up. Regardless of NTT’s intentions, the effect of the price hikes seems to fit this pattern.

“It is a very large coincidence that they [the NTT unit] are not going to suffer from this price increase and we are,” Fallmann said. “I am sure that in the corridors of power at NTT, this is a factor that has been taken into consideration.”

The NTT subsidiary, NTT Data Communications Corp., competes with Bloomberg but uses analog rather than digital lines. NTT says that while it hasn’t yet requested a price increase for these analog lines, it plans to do so. Those increases would affect the NTT subsidiary, spokesman Seko said.

In choosing to fight aggressively, Bloomberg is following a path chosen by a growing number of companies.

Last year, for example, complaints by Motorola Inc. over barriers to Japan’s cellular telephone market became a major trade issue between Tokyo and Washington. The dispute was settled on terms highly satisfactory to Motorola.

The White House, on behalf of U.S. auto firms, is betting on a similar outcome in its recent threat to impose 100% tariffs on 13 imported Japanese luxury cars as of June 28, a case that has sharply escalated trade tensions between the two nations.

Bloomberg said it will seek assistance from the U.S. government if its appeal to the Fair Trade Commission proves unsuccessful.

“I think it’s really true--the louder that you shout, the more you kick and scream and be the ugly gaijin [foreigner], the more you do that in Japan, unfortunately, the more successful you are,” Fallmann said. “I think more and more American companies are beginning to realize that.”

Bloomberg supplies financial information and business news to nearly 2,500 computer terminals in Tokyo through 700 leased telephone lines, of which about 600 are digital. Central to Bloomberg’s complaint is an NTT plan to raise the cost of a local digital leased line to $885 per month from $483 per month.

NTT plans this action even though in most countries, technological advances are lowering such prices, Fallmann said. Bloomberg’s expansion, projected at 35% this year, will be cut sharply if customers have to pay this additional charge, Fallmann said.

In its complaint, Bloomberg said there is “no effective competition” in Japan for local telephone services. In Tokyo, NTT holds about 93% of the market for leased lines.