Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten behind huge Barca deal

AFP, TOKYO: Japan’s online retail giant Rakuten has sealed a shirt sponsorship deal with Spanish football giants Barcelona worth at least 220 million euros ($205 million) over four years. 
Here are some key facts about the nation’s biggest 
e-commerce company, its founder and other Japanese firms’ foray into football sponsorship.The Tokyo-based firm—the name of which is Japanese for optimism—is primarily an online shopping mall founded by former banker Hiroshi Mikitani in 1997 in the early days of the e-commerce boom. 
However, it also operates other businesses including travel and financial services and owns professional sports teams.
Rakuten made waves in Japan in 2010 when Mikitani announced the company was making English its “corporate lingua franca” to both foster internal change and entice “the best of global talent”.
It has 13,000 employees and competes with US titans Amazon and Yahoo in Japan’s e-commerce market, racking up sales last year of 714 billion  yen ($6.5 billion), more than double from 346 billion yen in 2010.
After concentrating on Japan, it has been expanding overseas in recent years, which partly explains its huge shirt sponsorship deal, and scooping up companies from e-reader firm Kobo to messaging app provider Viber.  But Rakuten has hit some bumps in its ambitious international expansion, saying earlier this year it would cut back in Asia and close its online shopping malls and logistics facilities in Britain, Spain and Austria.
Born in 1965, the company chairman and CEO got his start at Industrial Bank of Japan, one of the country’s major banks, before being transferred to the US where he studied and graduated from Harvard Business School with an MBA.

Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten behind huge Barca deal

AFP, TOKYO: Japans online retail giant Rakuten has sealed a shirt sponsorship deal with Spanish football giants Barcelona worth at least 220 million euros ($205 million) over four years. Here are some key facts about the nations biggest e-commerce company, its founder and other Japanese firms foray into football sponsorship.The Tokyo-based firmthe name of which is Japanese for optimismis primarily an online shopping mall founded by former banker Hiroshi Mikitani in 1997 in the early days of the e-commerce boom. However, it also operates other businesses including travel and financial services and owns professional sports teams. Rakuten made waves in Japan in 2010 when Mikitani announced the company was making English its corporate lingua franca to both foster internal change and entice the best of global talent. It has 13,000 employees and competes with US titans Amazon and Yahoo in Japans e-commerce market, racking up sales last year of 714 billion yen ($6.5 billion), more than double from 346 billion yen in 2010. After concentrating on Japan, it has been expanding overseas in recent years, which partly explains its huge shirt sponsorship deal, and scooping up companies from e-reader firm Kobo to messaging app provider Viber. But Rakuten has hit some bumps in its ambitious international expansion, saying earlier this year it would cut back in Asia and close its online shopping malls and logistics facilities in Britain, Spain and Austria. Born in 1965, the company chairman and CEO got his start at Industrial Bank of Japan, one of the countrys major banks, before being transferred to the US where he studied and graduated from Harvard Business School with an MBA.