{"id":5253,"date":"2009-08-18T20:14:56","date_gmt":"2009-08-18T11:14:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/asiajin.com\/blog\/?p=5253"},"modified":"2009-08-18T20:14:56","modified_gmt":"2009-08-18T11:14:56","slug":"first-china-then-the-us-japans-no-1-online-shopping-mall-rakuten-again-outlines-plans-to-go-global","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asiajin.com\/blog\/2009\/08\/first-china-then-the-us-japans-no-1-online-shopping-mall-rakuten-again-outlines-plans-to-go-global\/","title":{"rendered":"First China, then the US: Japan&#8217;s No. 1 online shopping mall Rakuten (again) outlines plans to go global"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/img.asiajin.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/01\/rakuten.gif\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1964\" title=\"Rakuten\" src=\"http:\/\/img.asiajin.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/01\/rakuten.gif\" alt=\"Rakuten\" width=\"100\" height=\"47\" \/><\/a><br \/>\nHiroshi Mikitani, founder and president of Japan&#8217;s leading online shopping mall Rakuten, has never made a bis secret of his seeing Rakuten as a global brand (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.techcrunch.com\/2009\/07\/05\/japans-rakuten-can-the-biggest-e-commerce-site-you-never-heard-of-become-a-threat-for-amazon-globally\/\">here<\/a> is some detailed background).<br \/>\nThis is especially interesting since Rakuten is the biggest &#8220;purely&#8221; Japanese web company there is (its <a href=\"http:\/\/asiajin.com\/blog\/2009\/08\/16\/top-20-japans-most-valuable-web-companies\/\">market cap<\/a> exceeds $8 billion currently and SoftBank has a lot of other non-web related businesses, while Yahoo has a US background). To put things into perspective, this is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.techcrunch.com\/2008\/06\/17\/linkedin-raises-53-million-at-billion-dollar-valuation\/\">eight times more than LinkedIn&#8217;s current valuation<\/a> and comes <a href=\"http:\/\/www.techcrunch.com\/2009\/06\/29\/sharespost-report-facebook-worth-4-billion-linkedin-15-billion\/\">close to Facebook&#8217;s $10 billion valuation<\/a>.<br \/>\nWhat Rakuten has achieved so far in terms of globalization is:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>establishing a service called <a href=\"http:\/\/event.rakuten.co.jp\/borderless\/index_en.html\">Rakuten International Shipping Services<\/a> on their Japanese site for customers who can&#8217;t speak Japanese<\/li>\n<li>setting up <a href=\"http:\/\/travel.rakuten.co.jp\/en\/\">Rakuten Travel<\/a> in English on their Japanese site for tourists looking for places to stay on their Japan trip<\/li>\n<li>setting up offices in the US, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rakuten.com.tw\/\">Taiwan<\/a>, Korea, Guam, China, Thailand and Luxembourg<\/li>\n<li>buying and now running LinkShare (an affiliate marketing company) in the US for $425 million<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Screenshot of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rakuten.com.tw\/\">Rakuten Taiwan<\/a>&#8216;s top page:<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/img.asiajin.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/08\/rakuten-taiwan-top.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-5256\" title=\"rakuten-taiwan-top\" src=\"http:\/\/img.asiajin.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/08\/rakuten-taiwan-top-400x262.png\" alt=\"rakuten-taiwan-top\" width=\"440\" height=\"288\" \/><\/a><br \/>\nMikitani gave an interesting\u00a0 interview to the Nikkei, Japan&#8217;s biggest business newspaper, a few days ago, stating this isn&#8217;t all. In essence, he said that:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>his company wants international sales to eventually reach 50%+ of all sales (the number hovers at around 10% currently)<\/li>\n<li>Taiwan&#8217;s market for Rakuten is about one-fourth the size of Japan&#8217;s and there&#8217;s a lot of room for further growth<\/li>\n<li>Asia (China) is the next target market, followed by the US<\/li>\n<li>American retailers should have the possibility to offer products on Rakuten&#8217;s Japanese site<\/li>\n<li>the malls of different countries could be interconnected, resulting in a global shopping mall<\/li>\n<li>27 countries in total are on Rakuten&#8217;s list for internationalization (India is a high-potential market for Mikitani)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Mikitani also said his company is currently building a large-scale system, which is supposed to make it easier and quicker to roll out Rakuten services in multiple languages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hiroshi Mikitani, founder and president of Japan&#8217;s leading online shopping mall Rakuten, has never made a bis secret of his seeing Rakuten as a global brand (here is some detailed background). This is especially interesting since Rakuten is the biggest &#8220;purely&#8221; Japanese web company there is (its market cap exceeds $8 billion currently and SoftBank&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/asiajin.com\/blog\/2009\/08\/first-china-then-the-us-japans-no-1-online-shopping-mall-rakuten-again-outlines-plans-to-go-global\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">First China, then the US: Japan&#8217;s No. 1 online shopping mall Rakuten (again) outlines plans to go global<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8,24],"tags":[3047],"class_list":["post-5253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community","category-news","tag-rakuten","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiajin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiajin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiajin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiajin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiajin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/asiajin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5253\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiajin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiajin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiajin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}