Rakuten Group

Rakuten Group, Inc. was founded as MDM, Inc. in February 1997. According to its corporate history, when it opened the internet shopping mall Rakuten Ichiba that May it had six employees, one server and 13 merchants. It was renamed Rakuten, Inc. in June 1999 and Rakuten Group, Inc. in April 2021. It went public on the over-the-counter market (now TSE JASDAQ) in April 2000 and moved to the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in December 2013. Its founder, Hiroshi Mikitani, is representative director, chairman, president and CEO, and its head office is Rakuten Crimson House in Futako Tamagawa, Tokyo.

The businesses it gathered

Most of Rakuten's corporate history is a record of acquisitions and new ventures. The main ones:

E-books (Kobo), messaging (Viber), mobile phones: Rakuten has kept pulling in companies from other industries around its e-commerce membership. Rakuten itself calls this shape the "Rakuten Ecosystem".

Becoming a mobile network operator

The Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications approved Rakuten's 4G base station deployment plan in April 2018. Rakuten Mobile began MNO service in October 2019, and in March 2020 announced its full-scale commercial launch and the unlimited "Rakuten UN-LIMIT" plan at 2,980 yen a month. The up-front investment in building its own base stations shows up every year as the Mobile segment's loss.

All figures are on a Non-GAAP basis as first reported in each year's December results. The segment's scope has been reorganised several times, and each following year's report restates the prior year (the 2022 loss, for example, appears as ¥479.3 billion in the 2023 report). Rakuten says the loss peaked in the quarter ended March 2022. The 2025 figure is after counting the Mobile ecosystem's contribution to other segments; before that, the loss was ¥195.9 billion. Rakuten says the mobile business reached EBITDA profitability in 2025 and that its subscriber lines (MNO, MVNE and MVNO combined) passed 10 million in December 2025.

Key figures

Year ended December 2025 (January to December 2025), IFRS, from the financial results of 12 February 2026.

Segment figures are after the Mobile ecosystem contribution. IFRS operating income in 2024 was positive for the first time in five years (¥53.0 billion), but the report lists among that year's one-off items a ¥106.9 billion remeasurement gain from a change in the accounting treatment of shares in AST SpaceMobile. When comparing operating results across years, it matters whether the figure is Non-GAAP or IFRS and whether it includes one-off items.

As an AI customer

In this site's AI entries Rakuten appears as a customer. Anthropic's Claude 4 announcement cited Rakuten running a large open-source refactor with Opus 4 for seven hours, and Rakuten is named in the Tokyo office announcement covered under Claude Code. According to Rakuten's history, it also announced a collaboration with OpenAI in August 2023. With KDDI it agreed in November 2018 to make mutual use of each other's assets in payments, logistics and telecommunications.