Rakuten: ‘This is the most important industry and it shouldn’t be left to chance“
Andrew WoodenWritten by Andrew Wooden 6 days ago
Could you give us a quick update on Rakuten Mobile, what’s the last year been like?
For the Rakuten Group we’ve validated that the network, which has been built the modern cloud native software defined way, has equivalent or better quality than traditional build, so there is no reason now to believe that this technology doesn’t work at scale. And with high density deployments, Tokyo is one of the densest cities in the world, in terms of requirements.
We have 270,000 different cells in the network, and we have nine radio vendors on that. There’s only 250 operational people, these are people that touch the network to reconfigure it or to solve problems, and we are going to hold that at 250. So Tareq (Tareq Amin, CEO of Rakuten Mobile) has got a hiring freeze on just to force the fact that we aren’t going to end up in a place where humans just add without knowing.
The core business of Rakuten is actually rewards, loyalty and points. That’s what connects at the heart. That’s a data science discipline. And the fact that now we have a data driven operation of the connectivity layer can become useful and available to inform and instruct value inside the broader ecosystem of properties. So beyond our 67% revenue growth, 35% of people shopped at Rakuten shopping, or Ichiba as it’s known, 20% of people applied for credit card for the first time and 10% of people applied to Rakuten Bank for the first time, and 12% started using Rakuten pay the first time.
So we want to show this highly efficient programmable network can start to play an enabling role inside the broader online ecosystem. And we can start to show the economics and the traffic management and value flow above the connectivity. Now for operators outside of Japan that don’t have an ecosystem, we are still speaking according to those findings. Because we can share the rewards and loyalty point systems, which is the core business that’s transposable anywhere.
The important message to all other operators is that there is opportunity to contribute to an ecosystem of connectivity. But you need to have a modern, responsive programmable network and be able to safely and from a privacy way use that data to participate in the ecosystem. So that’s the next year’s journey, to actually build and prove that story.
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