Creative Idea Powerhouse

I have finally complete the base case study on Rakuten Inc, and also its largest retail mall Rakuten Ichiba.
The company currently claim that they have exceed 40million registered members, and more than 25,000 merchants stores using their platform to sell online. Its e-commerce business unit achieve sales of 14.2bil Yen in Q1 08, and 15.4bil Yen in Q2,08 respectively, which turn to be approximately US$100mil per quarter. The group financial reports US$1.7bil net sales in 2007, with US$304mil in Net income during the same period (17.2%) which is an interesting figure for a e-Commerce company in Asia. In early 2008, Rakuten Ichiba joint ventured with Taiwan’s President Chain Store to found Rakuten Ichiba Taiwan as its first attempt to bring its cybermall business oversea. The JV formed a NT$174million giant and successfully captured 440 shops signed up and 160k members registered. The formation also help Japanese merchants to ‘export’ their products to Taiwan members, which claims to be a strategic move for Rakuten Ichiba global expansion.
However, when we compare these figures with Amazon.com, it is really interesting to know that Amazon is currently having 78mil active members, and gross sales of US$14.8bil. during the same Y2007 financial report. Amazon also has seller group (merchants) of 1.3million worldwide.