Rakuten is often called the Amazon of Japan, but that comparison misses what makes it unique. Rather than building a logistics empire, Rakuten created an ecosystem where e-commerce, banking, mobile phone service, streaming, and loyalty points all feed into each other. Spend money at Rakuten’s marketplace, earn points, use them to pay your phone bill or invest — it’s a closed loop that keeps customers locked in.
Mikitani Hiroshi founded the company in 1997 with six employees and a $5 million investment. Today Rakuten Group employs over 30,000 people and operates in 30 countries. The marketplace hosts around 56,000 merchants and generates billions in annual gross merchandise sales.
The Rakuten Super Points program is the glue holding everything together. Members earn points on purchases and can redeem them across any Rakuten service. The company claims its loyalty program has over 100 million members in Japan alone — in a country of 125 million people.
Rakuten’s expansion hasn’t all been smooth. Their mobile network launch in Japan bled cash for years as they tried to build a fully cloud-native telecom network from scratch. International e-commerce operations in some markets were scaled back. But the core Japanese business remains extremely profitable, and their fintech arm — including Rakuten Bank and Rakuten Securities — continues to grow. The company also owns Viber, the messaging app with 260 million monthly users.
