Rakuten is a giant. Rakuten group has an Internet shopping mall ‘Rakuten‘, a hotel reservation site ‘Rakuten Travel’, ‘Rakuten Securities’, ‘Rakuten Credit Card’ and so on. Rakuten has $1.72 billion annual sales.
The mall and the travel agent has the biggest share of their markets like Amazon did on the book market.
Mikitani started his business as a normal Internet shopping mall. His strong selling team made Rakuten adopted by many small and medium sized companies.
Rakuten travel is the most popular Internet hotel reservation service in Japan. It was formerly called Tabimado and owned by a ship building company ‘Hitachi Zosen‘. Tabimado made a huge success of it. Rakuten bought the service in 2003 with 32.3 billion yen ($276 million) and changed its name.
Before starting Rakuten, Mikitani was working for a big bank, and has a Harvard MBA. Now he owns a baseball team and a soccer team. Very very Establishment, isn’t he?
See also (in English):
Rakuten:
- Type: public (JP:4755)
- Founded: 1997 Feb. 7
- Went Public: 2000 Apr. 19
- Users: 37.2 million
- Sales: 203 billion yen ($1.72 billion)
- Profit: 30 billion yen ($255 million)
- Employee: 3200+
- People: CEO, Hiroshi Mikitani (born 1965)
Shunichi Arai
Mikitani is doing well. The people who use their mind those can make their place in the history of world. I like these type of people whose work hard with their minds. Online shopping is a big activity in those days. People are buying online to save their money and time.