Hiroshi Mikitani: A New Chapter for Mobile Networking
Often referred to as a ‘maverick’, Hiroshi “Mickey” Mikitani continues to be a disruptive force in the world of Japanese business.
He has now been the Chairman and CEO of Rakuten Group since its founding in 1997 and has turned the company into a globally recognised e-commerce giant characterised by the Japanese service mindset of Empowerment and Omotenashi.
In 2010, he made the decision to mandate the English language in his organisation, Rakuten. Requiring employees to reach English fluency within two years shocked the business world, with other leaders criticising the decision and even referring to it as ‘stupid’. Yet, Mickey believed in this concept he calls “Englishnization” - suggesting that a company becoming fluent in English would offer a strong competitive advantage when seeking to enter into other markets around the world.
Rakuten now works with more than 57,000 professional merchants to offer millions of products to its more than 100 million members. It offers a high level of customer service and continues to expand its ecosystem of services.
A masterclass in optimism
Mickey was born in Kobe, Japan, in 1965. Attending Hitotsubashi University and graduating in 1988 with a degree in commerce, Mickey initially entered a career in banking. He initially worked at the Industrial Bank of Japan (now part of Mizuho Financial Group), during which time he earned his MBA from Harvard Business School, before leaving to start his own consulting group, Crimson Group.
However, the devastating 1995 earthquake in Kobe changed the trajectory of Mickey’s career completely. He realised that he wanted to help revitalise Japan’s economy and so quit banking to start his own business.
Known as Rakuten, the Japanese word for optimism, Mickey’s company was conceptualised as an online shopping mall, a website much like eBay. Its vision was to offer the opposite of what larger organisations were doing by offering empowerment to merchants by giving them greater control over their ‘virtual storefront’. Rakuten found its gap in the market by offering services for a smaller free and greater customisation opportunities than larger Internet malls.
“I started [Rakuten] to re-empower society, community and local merchants,” Mickey told LinkedIn in 2020. “[Others] started the business to replace the gigantic merchants, so that's a fundamental philosophical difference and it is very difficult to change.”
Disrupting international markets
With operations across 30 countries and regions in EMEA, the Americas and APAC, Rakuten now prides itself on being an international organisation. In order to achieve this, Mickey made a bold decision to mandate English across all Rakuten operations and amongst its internal staff. Japanese workers were even told to speak English to each other.
Mickey says that this was to enable Rakuten to become a global competitor and expand into Western e-commerce markets. He notably said that the English language is no longer an advantage, it is a requirement.
“[Our] ambition was to become a global service company. If you want to become a global service company, your organisation needs to be global,” he noted.
Rakuten has also spent the last decade making several international acquisitions in Germany, Brazil and the UK in order to bolster its global presence. Significantly, Mickey decided to acquire the global eReading company Kobo, which prompted the birth of one of the largest online book catalogues in the world.
A philanthropic trailblazer
Last year, Rakuten faced mounting pressures concerning its mobile division, which was struggling to achieve profit. In response, Mickey noted that the company was strategising to ensure the division would be “hugely profitable” moving forward.
“This is a very unique business,” he says in an interview with CNBC. “Our operating costs are a fraction of our competitors, we are not being impacted by legacy supply chains.
“We are innovating communications … it’s just a matter of time before we turn profitable.”
Alongside his responsibilities at Rakuten, Mickey has also had a leadership role across several other notable organisations in Japan. Having joined the Japanese business federation, Keidanren, in 2004, he left in 2011 shortly after the Fukushima nuclear disaster citing disagreement over its reliance on the nuclear industry for electricity.
Likewise, in 2022, he announced a ¥1 billion (US$8.7m) donation to the Ukrainian government to support it during the Russian invasion.
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