By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Rakuten keeps hiring employees from China to drive its internationalization efforts, even though overall numbers are still low. Japan’s biggest e-commerce company added five Chinese students in fiscal 2009, another 15 more in 2010, and aims at adding an additional 15 this year. Most of...
CNET Japan wrote a pretty interesting analysis on the success of Rakuten Recipe, a recipe site Japan’s biggest e-commerce company is running. Here’s a short summary: Rakuten opened the site in October 2010. Rakuten Recipe now has 40,000 recipes and a whopping 2 million users. Yahoo...
Rakuten today announced it has inked a deal with Okinawa to support the Japanese prefecture in its “regional development”.
Okinawa will be allowed to use Rakuten to promote, among other things, special events and seasonal specialties to the site’s 70 million registered members.
How is Groupon Japan doing exactly? Daily coupon search service CP4U posted a study [JP, PDF] today, in which they analyzed the sales numbers of Groupon and a total of 146 Japanese clones in December 2010 and January 2011. The chart below (via Asiajin) shows that Groupon generated 1.1 billion yen...
Rakuten has finally launched its online mall in China. After having inked a partnership with Google’s China, Baidu, “Lekutian” went live online in China today: Rakuten, Japan’s biggest e-commerce company ($10 billion market cap), and Chinese search leader Baidu have today opened a...
-> What is the closest Western analog of their business model? There is not really any Western analog, at least nothing that reaches the scope of Rakuten. Rakuten is *not* like Amazon, and it’s *not* like Ebay either. It’s an online mall which offers a collected setting to end...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry