Rakuten Subsidises Electronic Money Service Edy
BitWallet, Inc. [J], a company has been running Edy [J] since 2001, will allocate new stocks to a third party at the end of this year, about 3 billion yen of which will be bought by Rakuten.
Rakuten group, centres the giant e-commerce mall Rakuten Ichiba, purchased KC Card, a credit card company in 2005 (renamed to Rakuten KC Credit Card), online bank E-Bank in 2008, Rakuten Securities in 2003.
Edy’s device (boths card and chip in cellphones) have been issued over 50 million, which is bigger than any other digital money service in Japan. 6 out of 7 major convenience stores support Edy. So Edy is successful in terms of how widely to spread among people, but BitWallet has been recording red inc in 9 consecutive fiscal years.
See Also:
Rakuten’s release [J, pdf]
Edy Chief Strategist Interview [J]
Author Information Akky Akimoto is one of the first pro-bloggers [J] in Japan. As an individual he writes for Asiajin and his own Japanese weblog. He also produces web services including IvRead.com and Narabe.com. Twitter @akky 
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