An interview with NTT’s Chief IP Strategist Shunsuke Sakai

Japan’s multinational tech company, NTT, Inc. (not counting NTT Group’s other companies), currently oversees a portfolio of over 25,000 active granted patents globally, with over 9,000 of those outside Japan (North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific). NTT is more of a patentee than an implementer, but has defended cases in the past, including a recent action filed by Malikie Innovations, a subsidiary of Irish non-practising entity (NPE) Key Patent Innovations (April 10, 2026 ip fray article).

NTT’s IP center boasts 60 people, with 20 completely dedicated to licensing. Heading up the latter is Shunsuke Sakai, who has been at NTT since 1995, and was promoted to Chief Intellectual Property Strategist at the beginning of the month. He was director of licensing for seven years before that and held a variety of roles across NTT’s engineering and IP departments prior to that.

The licensing team is deliberately closely integrated with the rest of the IP function (portfolio strategy, prosecution, maintenance governance, and risk management) so that the company can “move efficiently” from invention and protection through to commercialization and value realization, he tells ip fray.

After Via Licensing Alliance’s (Via’s) Business Summit in Rome last month (March 20, 2026 ip fray article), Mr. Sakai also spoke to ip fray about the company’s monetization strategy, its views on the Brazilian and Indian markets, and advancing its data-driven innovation to support a more circular economy agenda.