Japanese Company Seeks Stake in VoiceStream

NTT DoCoMo Inc., Japan’s largest mobile-telephone company, is in final talks to buy a 15% to 20% stake in U.S. cellular-phone company VoiceStream Wireless Corp. for as much as $4.68 billion, the Nihon Keizai newspaper reported. The unit of Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp. and VoiceStream plan to integrate their services to offer handsets with Internet capabilities to customers in the U.S. and Japan. NTT DoCoMo plans to introduce technology next year that will let users make phone calls from the same handset anywhere in the world. NTT DoCoMo also is in talks to buy as much as 10% of SK Telecom Co. to gain access to Korea’s 26 million cellular subscribers. A spokeswoman at VoiceStream declined to comment on the talks. Tokyo-based NTT DoCoMo fell $1,123.39 to $26,681.46 on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Bellevue, Wash.-based VoiceStream rose 38 cents to close at $100.38 Friday on Nasdaq.

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