The story
Founded by Hiroshi Mikitani on Feb 7, 1997.1
Early years (1997–1999)
Rakuten was founded as MDM, Inc. by Hiroshi Mikitani on 7 February 1997. The online shopping marketplace Rakuten Shopping Mall (楽天市場, Rakuten Ichiba) was officially launched on May 1, 1997. The company had six employees and the website had 13 merchants.
The name was changed to Rakuten in June 1999. The Japanese word rakuten (楽天) means 'optimism'.
Harvard-educated former banker Mikitani envisioned the site as an online shopping mall, offering the opposite of what the larger companies like IBM were trying to do with similar services, by offering empowerment to merchants rather than trying to tightly control the virtual storefront. The service was offered for a smaller fee than the larger Internet malls were charging, and merchants were given more control, such as the ability to customize their storefronts on the site.
2000s
The company went public through an IPO on the JASDAQ market on April 19, 2000. At the time, the online marketplace had 2,300 stores and 95 million page views per month, making it one of the most popular sites in Japan.
In March 2001, the online hotel reservation service Rakuten Travel was launched.
In April 2002, a new system was introduced for merchants, combining monthly fixed fees with commissions on sales. That November, the Rakuten Super Point Program, a membership loyalty program, was introduced.
In September 2004, Rakuten grew its financial services businesses by acquiring consumer finance company Aozora Card Co., Ltd., later renaming it Rakuten Card Co., Ltd. The company began offering a Rakuten credit card in 2005. By November 2016, the Rakuten card was held by over 13 million people, and nearly 40% of Rakuten's revenue was from financial services, as it was operating Japan's largest Internet bank and third-largest credit company. Rakuten card holders are part of a point-based membership programme and can use those points to make purchases on the Internet mall. In 2016, the company introduced Rakuten Pay, an app-based smartphone payment system.
In October 2004, Rakuten Baseball was created, and the baseball team Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles was formed and joined Nippon Professional Baseball.
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In 2005, Rakuten started expanding outside Japan, mainly through acquisitions and joint ventures.
In December 2005, Rakuten established the Rakuten Institute of Technology in Tokyo as its department in charge of research and development.
In a joint venture in February 2008, Rakuten and President Chain Store established Rakuten's first e-commerce site outside of Japan with Rakuten Ichiba Taiwan.
2010s
Around 2011, Rakuten started heavily expanding outside of Japan, with prominent moves including a stake in Canadian e-book maker Kobo Inc. and an investment in Pinterest.
In 2011, Rakuten launched Indonesia's Rakuten Belanja Online.
By late 2012, Rakuten had moved into online retail in Austria, Canada, Spain, Taiwan and Thailand and the online travel markets in France—with Voyager Moins Cher.com—and China, Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan—with its Tokyo-based international Rakuten Travel platform. In North America, Rakuten Golf made booking tee times online possible. To increase its global competitiveness, and to better incorporate non-Japanese speakers, Rakuten decided to adopt English as the company's official language starting in 2012. By 2016, nearly 40% of the company's engineers in Japan were non-Japanese.
In September 2014, Rakuten bought Ebates for $1 billion to enter online shopping membership rewards in Canada, China, Russia, South Korea, and the United States.
In January 2015, Rakuten entered the sport of football by acquiring Vissel Kobe, a top J1 League team formed in 1995.
In March 2015, Rakuten announced that it would begin accepting Bitcoin across its global marketplaces, shortly after investing in San Francisco–based Bitcoin payments-processing startup Bitnet Technologies. Rakuten has been a strong supporter of Bitcoin's potential and was one of the first major companies to accept Bitcoin for payment. In 2015, Rakuten relocated its corporate headquarters from Shinagawa to the Tamagawa neighbourhood of Setagaya-ku, to consolidate its Tokyo offices and to accommodate future growth.
In 2016, Rakuten shut down retailing websites in the UK, Spain, Austria, Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia. In that year, the company lost its long status as the largest e-commerce site in Japan to Amazon Japan.
On November 16, 2016, Rakuten announced it had agreed to a four-year partnership with the La Liga football club FC Barcelona, one of the most successful football teams in Europe. The agreement would see Rakuten become FC Barcelona's main global partner beginning with the 2017-18 season, with its name appearing on match-day jerseys. The deal was worth at least €220 million and includes an option for a one-year extension.
In February 2017, Ebates and Rakuten acquired Shopstyle and its influencer marketing group, Collective, to extend into fashion curation, discovery and product search.
Rakuten partnered with California-based Blackstorm Labs to launch an online social gaming platform called R Games in April 2017, going live with 15 free games optimized for smartphones, including Pac-Man and Space Invaders. The games are based on HTML5, which can be played across any device and on any platform, and Rakuten will tap into its worldwide database of 114 million online shoppers. Rakuten plans to integrate R Games into its messaging app Viber.
In September 2017, Rakuten signed a three-year, $60 million deal to become the official sponsor for the jersey patch on the front of the uniforms for the Golden State Warriors of the NBA.
Rakuten partnered with Walmart for a late push on e-books in January 2018. The company announced plans to launch its cryptocurrency in March. In May 2018, Rakuten announced the fourth wireless mobile network in Japan, named Rakuten Mobile.
In June 2018 Ebates and Rakuten acquired Curbside to accelerate its online-to-offline offering to members and merchants.
In September 2019, negotiations successfully closed to acquire the Taiwanese baseball team, the Lamigo Monkeys. With the sale, Rakuten became the first foreign company to own a Chinese Professional Baseball League team. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The team name was formally changed to the Rakuten Monkeys on 17 December 2019. New uniforms, similar in design to those of the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles were released.
2020s
In July 2020, Rakuten announced that it would be closing its online shop/marketplace in the United States, which formerly went under the name Buy.com. The marketplace closed to new orders on 15 September and shut down after all remaining orders had been fulfilled.
In September 2020, Rakuten launched its wireless carrier service's 5G network in some areas of Japan after it started 4G services in April. The company named its network technology the Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP) which makes use of cloud computing to lower the price and started sales activity abroad, gaining at least fifteen international customers by the spring of 2021.
On September 24, 2020, Rakuten announced that they would shut down their online marketplace in Germany. As of October 15, 2020, they no longer accept new orders while all orders before that date were to be fulfilled.
In March 2021, Rakuten announced at a joint press conference attended by CEO Mikitani and the President of Japan Post Holdings that Rakuten would allot more than 8 per cent stake to Japan Post Holdings for 150 billion yen, accepting Japan Post Holdings as the third-largest shareholder after the Mikitani family in the first-ever major capital tie-up for Rakuten, to be financially equipped to spend billions on installing telecommunications infrastructure across Japan in competition with rival Amazon Japan. Tencent and Walmart, the previous owners of Seiyu Group, now partially owned by Rakuten, also took stakes of 3.65% and 0.9% respectively.
In February 2022, Rakuten founder Hiroshi Mikitani donated ¥1 billion ($8.7 million) to humanitarian actions in Ukraine amid the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
In 2023, Rakuten partnered with Supermicro on high-performing Open Radio Access Network (RAN) and storage systems for operators of cloud-based mobile services.
On September 30, 2026, Rakuten France marketplace ceased operations.
On 1 October 2026, Rakuten completed a reorganisation of its financial-services business under which Rakuten Card and Rakuten Securities Holdings became wholly owned subsidiaries of Rakuten Bank. The transaction used newly issued Rakuten Bank shares as consideration for the acquired holdings.
From Wikipedia’s article on Rakuten, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.7