Creative Idea Powerhouse

Due to recent project, I need to do a research on the Japanese giant e-Commerce Rakuten Inc. Its 2007 reporting net sales reached US$1.76 billion and Net Profit of US$304million (17.2% of Net Sales). It has total of 43.9million members under Rakuten Group (which 35.9million are from Malls business); and 22,396 merchants (stores). Under the leadership of its founder and CEO, Mr. Hiroshi Mikitani, the company has involves itself into multiple businesses such as Credit Card & Payment, Portal and Media, Telco, Securities and Travel industries.

I have gathered a short summary about this company to share with the entreprenuers in Malaysia:

5 secrets of Mr. Hiroshi’s Rakuten Success
1. Get things done (Kaizan concept)- continue learning and improvement from day to day – also the secret of Toyota Motors
2. Complete Professionalism- be the professional, the best in what you do in your industry – Jack Welch GE’s spirit
3. Hypothesize, Execute, Verify & Incorporate – visualize, and focus, then execute and corrective action
4. Customer satisfaction maximization - easy to say by many companies, even large corporations but when come to implementation, I still see many local companies take customers as secondary priority, where I have many bad experience on this.
5. Speed!, speed!! & speed!!! – this personally give me a big motivation to get onto action rather than plan plan plan….

Of course, the company itself also equip with most of the attributes to be a successful tech & web company, good working environment, free foods, continue learning & improvement culture,  and I have to admit that the most important thing over this is that they are putting customer as the first and most important priority all the time. They even have their Rakuten University to help customer to improve their e-commerce store, and a team of e-marketing experts to provide instant support and help when needed. Ask back our local website builder company, how many really putting the efforts on this? Time to change..

I will soon put up my whole paper about this company to share with you, meanwhile email me if you need to find out additional information about this company, or you have some insightful information to share with me drop me msg at eddie at ciph dot biz.

Rakuten.co.jp users come from these countries:
Japan95.1%
China2.6%
United States0.5%
South Korea0.3%
Taiwan0.2%