NTT lost fixed telephone lines in all 47 Japanese prefectures last year. Its competitors gained lines in 21 of them and still finished 84,573 lines down. Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications published the table on Friday, covering the year to 31 March. NTT is the former state telephone monopoly, privatised in 1985 and renamed NTT, Inc. last July, and its two regional arms still own most of the local access lines in the country. The whole network lost 762,676 lines on the revised basis the ministry now publishes. NTT shed 678,103. Its rivals shed 84,573. Both sides shrank. Two prefectures now sit below half. Mie at 49.3 percent. Nara at 49.4. A year ago Japan's communications ministry named one, Nara at 49.9. Mie is the only prefecture that crossed this year. Its rivals added 4,932 lines while NTT lost 10,473, and both moves pushed the same way. In Nara the rivals lost 3,659 and the share fell regardless. The two prefectures below half arrived by opposite routes. Copper explains all of it. NTT holds what the ministry calls a near monopoly of the metal lines, 92.4 percent of them, and metal fell from 28.3 percent of every line in the country to 25.6 in a single year, so the shrinking of that one category pulls the national share down on its own without anyone switching supplier. Then the figure that turns it around. NTT East's share went up, from 75.4 percent to 75.6. Only NTT West fell. A national decline that reads like competition is one half of one company losing copper in the west. NTT plans to end metal telephone service around 2035 and move customers to fibre or mobile. A line that moves to mobile leaves this count entirely. Japanese law puts a threshold at exactly one half, and crossing it lets the minister designate a carrier for open access rules. Nara crossed a year ago. In March Japan's communications ministry approved NTT's tariff for all 47 prefectures with no carve out.

🚨 THE WORLD HAS LOST 10% OF ITS OIL INVENTORIES IN JUST 3 MONTHS. And the market still does not fully understand how serious this supply shock is becoming. Before the war, the Strait of Hormuz moved roughly 20-21 million barrels of oil per day, nearly 20% of global oil consumption. Now flows are collapsing. According to EIA data: • Total oil and liquid flows through Hormuz fell from 20.7 mbpd in Q4 2025 to 14.6 mbpd in Q1 2026. • Crude and condensate flows alone dropped from 15.2 mbpd to 10.7 mbpd. At the same time, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, UAE, and Kuwait together reportedly cut around 6.7 mbpd of production tied to Hormuz disruptions. The inventory draw is becoming massive. Energy Intelligence estimates: • Inventories fell roughly 230 million barrels in March • Another 553 million barrels in April • And at least 200 million more in May That is close to 1 BILLION barrels removed from inventories in just 3 months. The IEA says inventory draws recently reached around 4 mbpd and warns the market could remain “severely undersupplied” until at least October even if the conflict stabilizes sooner. The bigger problem starts after the war. Even if flows normalize, the world still has to rebuild those lost inventories. And rebuilding them may take years. If the current crisis eventually creates a 1-2 billion barrel inventory hole by the time the system fully stabilizes, the market would need roughly 1.8 mbpd of EXTRA surplus supply for 3 straight years just to refill inventories. That is where the real issue appears. This is why the current oil situation matters so much. The market is not only dealing with a war-driven supply shock. It is dealing with a global oil system that already had very little spare capacity left before the crisis even started.