Japanese telecoms giant NTT offers researchers million-dollar salaries to rival Google, Apple

Telecommunications giant NTT Group is offering record pay to hire top scientists, as it looks to match some of the basic research prowess of global technology powerhouses like Alphabet’s Google and Apple.

The former Japanese telephone monopoly set annual salaries of as much as US$1 million for researchers at its Palo Alto, California, labs, said Kazuhiro Gomi, president of the company’s research arm. That is more than the company pays its chief executive and 41-year veteran Jun Sawada, and a rare step for a traditional Japanese company.

The increased investment in basic science comes as NTT is regrouping its businesses to focus more on cloud computing services and data centres amid a dimming outlook for profit from its mainstay mobile phone carrier operations. Having star scientists on the lab’s payroll, backed by a 25 billion yen (US$230 million) five-year budget, helps the group draw better technology workers and partners as it wages a global war for top talent it needs to expand globally, Gomi said.

“We are competing with companies like Google and Apple,” said Gomi, explaining that the company had traditionally followed the Japanese norm of modest pay. “It wouldn’t be possible several years back.”

Tatsuaki Okamoto, director of cryptography and information security for NTT Research, is an example of a star that has helped draw in other top researchers in encryption, where interest in cryptocurrencies has led to surging demand for expertise. Okamoto, an NTT R&D fellow since 1999, is known globally as a key researcher on blockchain technologies for cryptocurrencies.

The talent NTT is gathering is focused on cryptography, quantum computing and medical informatics in a bet that these fields can yield breakthroughs on a horizon of five years or more, said Kei Karasawa, vice-president of corporate strategy for NTT Research.