By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
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.
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...
Three top e-commerce entrepreneurs from Japan: 1) Hiroshi Mikitani from Rakuten (). $10 billion market cap. 2) Minoru Tanaka from Kakaku.com () $1.5 billion market cap. 3) Teruhide Sato from Netprice (;) $70 million market cap. Note: Mikitani and Sato started their e-commerce platforms by...
Here is the link to a column I wrote on the race between Amazon Japan and Rakuten for the journal for the American Chamber Of Commerce in Japan. Excerpt: The Japanese economy is mired in deflation, the population is shrinking rapidly, and retail sales are projected to fall by 1 percent annually in...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry