Rakuten Mobile turns a corner, but the road ahead is long
In addition, Rakuten says that from here, more customers pay for operator services.
All of these metrics matter: wider coverage improves the customer’s mobile service experience and reduces roaming costs. More paying customers means more revenue, and Rakuten expects that revenue to improve by leaps and bounds as it scraps the free service package it initially offered to attract early adopters to its 4G network.
This free offer is in the process of retraction and will be gone completely by the end of October.
As a result, Rakuten Mobile expects average revenue per user (ARPU) to improve by about 50% during the current quarter alone, which is a significant jump.
Since the free offer is no longer available to attract new signups, Rakuten Mobile now needs to demonstrate its ability to attract new paying customers every quarter, with Mikitani citing 12 million customers as a target (although no timeline for this target was mentioned) 15 million or 20 million during the presentation of his earnings. To help reach these goals, it is planning a major marketing push and will add additional services: Remember that the bigger picture for Rakuten is to build a market presence in multiple digital service segments and get customers from each segment using other Rakuten group services – the company is not just building Mobile phone business for being a mobile operator.
Symphony is expanding rapidly in an effort to attract business from other network operators around the world. So far, its only major commercial involvement outside of Japan is in Germany, where it is building and will operate 1&1’s Greenfield, 5G-based Open RAN.
But according to Mikitani, there is a lot of interest in what Symphony has to offer, which made a lot of noise during this year’s MWC event in Barcelona. He noted that Symphony has 13 customers (including Rakuten Mobile and 1&1) but has a “pipeline” of 115 interested companies. It has 3,500 employees and offices in eight countries: Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, India, the United Arab Emirates and Singapore.
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