I was invited to the Rakuten Expo 2008 by Rakuten Co Ltd, which is the biggest Internet online shopping mall in Japan, because our shop has its 10th anniversary this year on Rakuten. Rakuten started the shopping mall business in 1997, one year after we decided to have a shop on Rakuten added to our original online shops. In the Rakuten Expo 2008, we had a champagne party with several shop owners or representatives from shops which started in 1997 and 1998. I was surprised to hear that there were only 39 shops now, as even Rakuten had about 25,000 shops. In 1997, they started 13 shops and had 6 staff members including CEO, Hiroshi Mikitani, who is the founder of Rakuten. I only met him a few years ago, but yesterday we talked for a while along with some of the board members who used to be my company’s consultants. Just ten years passed, but many things have changed such as more user online shopping, broad band access, shopping by mobile phone, competitive markets etc. They say their strategy would target the global market and an online shop by mobile phone. I am interested in their global market strategy as they have a very good shopping system called RMS which is able to compete with the overseas Internet firms. Also we had the experience of having sold many things to overseas markets.
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