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.
In December 2005, Rakuten established the Rakuten Institute of Technology in Tokyo as its department in charge of research and development. In 2005, Rakuten started expanding outside Japan, mainly through acquisitions and joint ventures.
#Japanese to english dictionary amazon professional#
In October 2004, Rakuten Baseball was created, and the baseball team Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles was formed and joined Nippon Professional Baseball. In 2016, the company introduced Rakuten Pay, an app-based smartphone payment system. Rakuten card holders are a part of a point-based membership program, and can use those points to make purchases on the Internet mall. īy 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. The company began offering a Rakuten credit card in 2005. 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. That November, the Rakuten Super Point Program, a membership loyalty program, was introduced. In April 2002, a new system was introduced for merchants, combining monthly fixed fees with commissions on sales. In March 2001, the online hotel reservation service Rakuten Travel was launched. 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.
The company went public through an IPO on the JASDAQ market on April 19, 2000. 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. 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 Japanese word "rakuten" ( 楽天) means "optimism". The name was changed to Rakuten in June 1999. The company had six employees and the website had 13 merchants. The online shopping marketplace Rakuten Shopping Mall ( 楽天市場, Rakuten Ichiba) was officially launched on May 1, 1997. Hiroshi Mikitani, founder and CEO of Rakuten
The services operating under the Mobile segment are: The FinTech segment operates the following businesses: