Japan’s subsea cable champion NEC is set to receive government support to buy the ships needed to put it on a par with US, French and Chinese rivals, as the vital communications infrastructure increasingly becomes a national security concern.

NEC charters its vessels, while the other three major global players — New Jersey-based SubCom, France’s state-owned Alcatel Submarine Networks, and China’s HMN Tech, a former Huawei subsidiary — all have the advantage of owning cable-laying fleets.

Officials in Tokyo are preparing to close that gap by providing subsidies that could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars for NEC to buy ships. It currently relies on a subsea cable-laying vessel leased from a Norwegian group in 2022 on a four-year charter, partnerships with other companies and on renting the specialist ships on an ad hoc basis to meet surging demand for fibre-optic cabling in the Indo-Pacific.