Introduction
“At Rakuten, we are currently accelerating the global expansion of the Rakuten Ecosystem into the Americas, Europe, Asia and Oceania, starting with our e-commerce, eBooks & eReading, and travel businesses. By introducing our unique corporate philosophy of empowering people and society through the Internet we hope to continue to grow the Rakuten Group globally and to eventually realize our vision of a global Rakuten Ecosystem.” (Mikitani, 2013)
Hiroshi Mikitani, CEO of Rakuten Inc., a Japanese electronic commerce and Internet company based in Tokyo, Japan, is one of the wealthiest men in Japan. One of the forty businesses which he owns, is Rakuten Ichiba, the largest B2B2C e-commerce site in Japan and among the world’s largest by sales. With at least seven out of ten Japanese people members of Rakuten and a total of 41,966 merchants on its online shopping platform, Rakuten is easily the most influential e-commerce company in Japan (Rakuten Inc., 2013) and that perhaps explains Mikitani’s affluence today. However, the CEO of the already largest e-commerce platform in Japan does not intend to remain at status quo. He has outlined various goals for Rakuten and most of which point to globalization – an ideal which many companies are working towards. Japan hasn’t had a single Internet company breakout to become global success story; however, Mikitani is hoping to change that.
Rakuten has just started its globalizing efforts in the last few years. From setting up overseas offices, acquisitioning of small medium enterprises, implementing an English-nization project, to hiring overseas talents. However, will Rakuten actually become a global powerhouse? How successful are these efforts? In this paper, I will discuss Rakuten...
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As compared to the other major companies in Japan, Rakuten is a considerably progressive company overall. However, albeit the great effort Rakuten has put in to achieve its aim of becoming a global company, it is still a distance away from achieving that goal. Its globalizing efforts such as the setting up of overseas offices, acquisitioning of small-medium enterprises, join ventures, Englishnization project and active hiring of foreign nationals have in many ways helped path the way for Rakuten to become a global powerhouse but they are, unfortunately, not a hundred percent successful. These global strategies could be further worked upon and hopefully in the near future, Rakuten could eventually become one of the leading Internet companies in the world. However, whether Rakuten could become the number one Internet company in the world remains a question mark.
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the global leader in online retail. By taking advantage of the opportunities to capture the market
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