News In Brief

For the second day in a row, a subsidiary of Japanese communications giant Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp. said it was making a multibillion-dollar investment on foreign soil. Under a deal announced in Tokyo, NTT DoCoMo will pay just under $5 billion for a 15 percent stake in the Dutch cellular phone company KPN Mobile. On Monday, another subsidiary, NTT Communications, announced it would pay $5.5 billion for all remaining shares in US Web site manager Verio Inc.

For a symbolic $16, luxury automaker BMW agreed to sell its money-losing Rover subsidiary, effective immediately, to Phoenix, a British consortium. But to help smooth the transition, BMW will lend the buyer $765 million. Phoenix, headed by an ex-Rover chief executive, has pledged to cut far fewer assembly-line jobs than Alchemy Partners, BMW's original preferred buyer. The latter, a London venture capital fund, had agreed March 16 to acquire Rover, but its plan to eliminate thousands of jobs angered union members and led to the collapse of the deal late last month.

(c) Copyright 2000. The Christian Science Publishing Society