The brand of Japanese tech large Rakuten brand seen on the Cell World Congress 2019.
Paco Freire| SOPA Pictures | LightRocket by way of Getty Pictures
Shares of Japanese tech large Rakuten jumped 20% on Monday, extending their positive aspects after the corporate’s announcement that it plans to lift $2.2 billion with a view to higher compete with its U.S. rivals.
Rakuten stated on Friday it is going to promote an 8.3% stake to postal and banking large Japan Publish, which would be the greatest shareholder exterior of the founding Mikitani household. Chinese language web firm Tencent will take a 3.6% stake, whereas U.S. retailer Walmart will purchase a 0.9% stake.
Rakuten has over 70 companies starting from e-commerce, cell community, video streaming and monetary know-how. It has a market capitalization of round 1.79 trillion Japanese yen ($16.4 billion).
Hiroshi Mikitani, Rakuten’s founder, chairman and chief government, advised CNBC on Monday that his firm is “rising very quick — even at this measurement — and we want extra capital for the expansion.”
He defined that Rakuten and Japan Publish are collectively growing capabilities in synthetic intelligence to make deliveries — particularly in rural areas — extra environment friendly. The 2 firms may additionally collaborate on fintech, stated Mikitani.
Breaking into China’s market
In the meantime, the tie-up with Tencent marks one other try by Rakuten to penetrate the Chinese language market. Mikitani stated his firm had a failed partnership with Chinese language web large Baidu previously.
“I should be very sincere and China has been a really troublesome marketplace for us to penetrate,” he advised CNBC’s “Squawk Field Asia.”
“Now with a partnership with Tencent, we now have a channel to export Japanese merchandise to Chinese language market, in addition to export Japanese content material … to the Chinese language market as properly,” he added.
Rakuten’s income final yr stood at 1.46 trillion yen ($13.35 billion) — a rise of 15.2% from a yr in the past. However it incurred an working lack of 93.85 billion yen ($860.57 million) in 2020, reversing the working revenue of 72.75 billion yen a yr in the past.