Apr 22 (Nikkei) - In early March, Rakuten executives Hiroshi Mikitani and Tareq Amin returned to Barcelona, the site of their fateful first meeting. On the sidelines of the Mobile World Congress in 2018, Amin, then an executive at Indian telecom Reliance Jio, had sold Rakuten founder Mikitani on the idea of building Japan's fourth mobile network and using a then-untested technology to do it.
"I told Mickey that this was a very risky approach," Amin, now chief technology officer of Rakuten Mobile, told Nikkei Asia in an interview. "If we want to disrupt, we will need to do things differently."
Building a domestic carrier that can compete with the likes of SoftBank is already an ambitious goal, but Rakuten is aiming even higher. It also hopes to sell its novel mobile infrastructure technology, constructed on open cloud-based software, to customers overseas, pitting it against traditional telecom infrastructure builders like Ericsson and Huawei.
One of the best sales pitches to foreign operators would be a successful rollout of its technology at home. Two years into commercial operations, however, Rakuten Mobile has incurred a $2 billion loss for parent company Rakuten Group, whose share price is down around 17% this year, and its customer base remains a modest 5.5 million in a country of 125.8 million.
With analysts and investors worried about strain the rollout is putting on Rakuten's healthier businesses, the company is entering a crucial phase for its mobile ambitions to pay off.
Rakuten, perhaps better known as Japan's homegrown answer to Amazon, joined Japan's mobile market in April 2020. Its aim was to offer rates that would entice users away from the country's entrenched trio of SoftBank, NTT and KDDI. ...continue reading
