The author seems to believe that the fact this error was not reported is an indication that no one reads the printed market data page. That conclusion is not at all supported by the evidence.
First of all, I think everyone is willing to acknowledge that no one reads the market data page line by line from top to bottom. People go to this in order to look up the value of particular stocks and commodities. So anyone who went to this page to look up a different stock (or several different stocks) would never even see this error. Yet they would be benefiting from the FT market data page.
Furthermore, public companies are complicated. For instance: there are two separate ticker symbols: GOOG and GOOGL. On any given day they will have market prices that are slightly different but fairly close to each other. Is this because the Financial Times has accidentally listed this ticker symbol twice? No! It is because Google has chosen to list two different classes of stock on the market. I do not know enough to be sure that listing "Nippon T&T" and "Nippon TT" separately is incorrect -- perhaps one is a subsidiary of the other which, for technical reasons, has the same stock value. I am willing to believe if this author knows otherwise and wants to report this error to the Financial Times. But it is certainly not the case that anyone who had seen this discrepancy would necessarily have reported it, so the continuation of the error is not evidence that no one ever reads this page.
First of all, I think everyone is willing to acknowledge that no one reads the market data page line by line from top to bottom. People go to this in order to look up the value of particular stocks and commodities. So anyone who went to this page to look up a different stock (or several different stocks) would never even see this error. Yet they would be benefiting from the FT market data page.
Furthermore, public companies are complicated. For instance: there are two separate ticker symbols: GOOG and GOOGL. On any given day they will have market prices that are slightly different but fairly close to each other. Is this because the Financial Times has accidentally listed this ticker symbol twice? No! It is because Google has chosen to list two different classes of stock on the market. I do not know enough to be sure that listing "Nippon T&T" and "Nippon TT" separately is incorrect -- perhaps one is a subsidiary of the other which, for technical reasons, has the same stock value. I am willing to believe if this author knows otherwise and wants to report this error to the Financial Times. But it is certainly not the case that anyone who had seen this discrepancy would necessarily have reported it, so the continuation of the error is not evidence that no one ever reads this page.