Rakuten wesentlich besser als Rocket

(Rakuten Viber, Rakuten kobo, Rakuten VIKI)

EBITDA positive in Q3 and

Non-GAAP OI positive in Q4

(JPY mm)
Non-GAAP OI

Q4/17 = minus 2139

Q1/18 = minus 2072

Q2/18 = minus 1842

Q3/18 = minus 1382

Q4/18 = minus 1240

Q1/19 = minus 1100

Q2/19 = minus 661

Q3/19 = minus 540

Q4/19 = plus 144

global.rakuten.com/corp/investors/...2&category=corp%20ir

Rakuten says base station roll-out ahead of schedule, pricing announcement planned for 3 March. Rakuten announced it it is on track to launch 4G services in April and 5G services in June on its new mobile network under construction in Japan. Pricing for customers will be announced 03 March. Presenting its annual results, the company said base station roll-out was ahead of schedule, with just over 3,300 sites in place. The aim is to have 4,400 by March, when it needs to meet the licence target of 3,432 sites. The company is aiming for a full service launch in April, after already conducting a free trial with a small group of customers in recent months. The 5G service should follow in June, with 5G service in all prefectures by March 2021.

www.telecompaper.com/news/...ent-planned-for-3-march--1326506

Mobile revenues were up 54 percent year-on-year in Q4 to JPY 36.4 billion and rose by a third over the full year to JPY 119.8 billion thanks to expansion of the MVNO business. The virtual operator finished the year with 2.3 million subscribers, up from 1.7 million in 2018.

www.telecompaper.com/news/...ent-planned-for-3-march--1326506

des MVNO business in das MNO business kenne ich bisher keine Äußerungen von Rakuten Mobile.

Rakuten Card Number of Cardholders surpassed 19mm:
Number of cardholders surpassed 19mm in January 2020, and continues to grow at a record pace

Jul/14 = 10 million

Mar/15 = 11 million

Nov/15 = 12 million

Aug/16 = 13 million

Apr/17 = 14 million

Jan/18 = 15 million

Aug/18 = 16 million

Mar/19 = 17 million

Aug/19 = 18 million

Jan/20 = 19 million

global.rakuten.com/corp/investors/...2&category=corp%20ir
Latest IR MaterialsFull Year and Fourth Quarter 2019Download presentation material

aber im Fall von Pinterest hätte ich mir auch noch höhere Erlöse vorstellen können, denn sowohl ein früherer Verkauf als in Q4/19 als auch ein Verkauf in diesem Quartal hätten u.U. zu höheren Erlösen geführt. Da man hier drei Unternehmen (Overdrive, Pinterest und Careem) zusammengefasst hat, lässt sich nur schwer ein Urteil über die Verkaufsstrategie fällen.

Rakuten sells entire Pinterest stake as it offloads tech holdings

TOKYO -- Japanese e-commerce conglomerate Rakuten on Thursday said it sold $1.4 billion worth of shares in its technology holdings, including its entire stake in U.S. social networking service Pinterest, underlying growing concerns about overvaluations in the sector.

asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/...-offloads-tech-holdings

Und im Gegensatz zur deutschen Situation hat sich Rakuten im digitatlen Zahlungsverkehr nicht von den US-Internet-Riesen die „Butter vom Brot nehmen lassen“.

Total number of Rakuten Pay Users = 46 million
(As of December 2019)


global.rakuten.com/corp/investors/...2&category=corp%20ir
Latest IR MaterialsFull Year and Fourth Quarter 2019Download presentation material

Das Operating Income ist zwar  von 161,1 JPY bn in 2018 auf 95,1 JPY bn in 2019 gefallen, aber das FY18 Operating Income (excl. gains from investment business) ist von 89,4 JPY bn auf das FY19 Operating Income (excl. gains from investment business, upfront investments for future growth) von 91,3 JPY bn gestiegen.

global.rakuten.com/corp/investors/...2&category=corp%20ir
Latest IR MaterialsFull Year and Fourth Quarter 2019Download presentation material

Certainly, since we started in June 2018 until today, we had over 150 global mobile operator coming to Japan. We have met with various government agencies to understand the tenants of the technology. And the first question they asked, "What are the key success factors? What differentiates Rakuten network?" And ladies and gentlemen, I think you have attended -- I see some of you have -- have came here many times before. Believe me, these moments are very special. I think this is the recreation of something much bigger than AWS. This is the opportunity to look at networks in a very different view. So for us, we started with things that matter financially. We started by saying the radio access network must be virtualized. This is where almost 75% of ad caps get spend. So first thing that we had to do, we had to accomplish the virtualization of radio access. As I told some of you before, this is what we've been told before, it's impossible. It cannot be done. And this is the things that, I think, we have finished in the past 18 months. The radio access is done.

finance.yahoo.com/news/...ript-4755-t-earnings-011003507.html

Conference Calls von gestern:

finance.yahoo.com/news/...ript-4755-t-earnings-011003507.html

Jeremy Grantham's Top 5 Buys of the 4th Quarter

GuruFocus.com
February 13, 2020

Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo, the firm co-founded by Jeremy Grantham (Trades, Portfolio), disclosed this week that its top five buys for fourth-quarter 2019 were Humana Inc. (NYSE:HUM), Lyft Inc. (NASDAQ:LYFT), The Stars Group Inc. (NASDAQ:TSG), Wright Medical Group NV (NASDAQ:WMGI) and Tiffany & Co. (NYSE:TIF).

According to GuruFocus, Lyft has a cash-to-debt ratio of 6.96, suggesting good short-term financial strength.


finance.yahoo.com/news/...turnaround-potential-172855539.html

In Mobile World Congress, we were going to announce something very, very special. And hopefully, we will find time to explain this to you. The definition of Rakuten Mobile platform, RMP, which is the world's first cloud connectivity platform, I think, hopefully, in future sessions, we will show and demonstrate how this is going to change, not just the telco industry in Japan, but I think the opportunity, as we look abroad, the interest from many, many partners is very huge. And I think this is where the future is, but Japan must be perfected. First use case is in Japan. And then we go from Japan, across the world and export a technology that was built in this country to other markets.

finance.yahoo.com/news/...ript-4755-t-earnings-011003507.html

SINGAPORE, 5 February 2019 – Today, iPrice Group and ViSENZE announced a partnership that will bring more exciting products to shoppers when they shop with their AI-powered Shopping Lens embedded in their smartphones. Since 2019, smartphone users across Southeast Asia are able to use Visual Shopping Lens powered by ViSenze on their mobile phones to check if an item is available for online purchase.

As part of the partnership, iPrice brings over a billion new products from thousands of merchants across Southeast Asia for consumers to choose from when they shop with their mobile phone Shopping Lens that is powered by ViSENZE.

iPrice Group catalogs more than 1 billion products from seven countries, namely Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Philippines, and Hong Kong. With the booming E-commerce market in these countries, especially Vietnam and Indonesia, both iPrice and ViSenze vow to work together for continuous technology and catalog enhancements for the best user experience in the region.  

www.minimeinsights.com/2020/02/14/...pping-in-southeast-asia/

In short, Rakuten Ichiba, last year, had a very strong year. Every year, it's been growing. But in the last several years, last year's growth was especially strong. There are different key metrics that we are looking at. But for the growth of the mall, what is important is the number of customers. So the customer base has been growing steadily. But on top of that, the existing customers' frequency -- shopping frequency has been going up as well as LOB. So those are important factors. But for the growth of the shopping mall, the number of customers, that is the most important trigger or metric. And last year, we had a very good growth in these metrics.

finance.yahoo.com/news/...ript-4755-t-earnings-011003507.html

(trotz der Umbenennung – früher Ebates bzw. Rakuten Ebates)

Rakuten Rewards(Ebates)GMS, in Millionen US-Dollar

Q4/17 = 3685

Q1/18 = 2259

Q2/18 = 2494

Q3/18 = 2537

Q4/18 = 4219

Q1/19 = 2686

Q2/19 = 2970

Q3/19 = 2930

Q4/19 = 4704

global.rakuten.com/corp/investors/...2&category=corp%20ir
Latest IR MaterialsFull Year and Fourth Quarter 2019Download presentation material

wobei die Rebranding-Kosten noch herausgerechnet wurden, man ist aber wieder in der Spur:

Rakuten Rewards(Ebates)Operating Income*(USDmm)

* Excludes rebranding cost of USD 36.3 million(Q1/19),USD30.4million(Q2/19),USD20.4million(Q3/19)and USD27.3million(Q4/19)
(USDmm)

Q4/17 = 28,3

Q1/18 = 10,5

Q2/18 = 22,1

Q3/18 = 14,1

Q4/18 = 22,5

Q1/19 = 9,4

Q2/19 = 22,7

Q3/19 = 13,7

Q4/19 = 28,3

global.rakuten.com/corp/investors/...2&category=corp%20ir
Latest IR MaterialsFull Year and Fourth Quarter 2019Download presentation material

Das ergibt in 2019 immerhin einen Gewinn von 74,1 Millionen und bei einem KGV von 25, das eher niedrig angesetzt ist einen Unternehmenswert von 1,85 Milliarden US-Dollar.

die ca. 40% an Cabify halten und nicht auf Konfrontation/Verdrängung, sondern auf Zusammenarbeit ausgerichtet sind, und Vorschriften und Gesetze beachten.

Cabify, an app that allows users to request transportation, incorporates a new service in its platform.
The new service is in the category "Taxi", which allows users to request a taxi through the Cabify app, enjoying advantages such as the possibility of making payment in cash. This bet of Cabify translates into greater availability of services for users, and is also an invitation to taxi drivers to become driving partners of the app.

Call for the taxi sector

In this way, Cabify seeks to establish synergies and promote alliances with the taxi sector so that, rather than an alternative of the competition, they become authentic collaborators and allies.

www.onlinemarketplaces.com/articles/...to-launch-new-category

Miguel Cordon · 4 Nov 2019 · 2 min read

Gojek to enter Malaysia, the Philippines in 2020

Ride-hailing giant Gojek revealed upcoming plans for its business, which include expanding its services to Malaysia and the Philippines in 2020, Jakarta Globe reported.

The company is looking to change the ratio of its domestic versus international customers from 80:20 to 50:50 in the next five years, Gojek co-CEO Andre Soelistyo said during the celebration of the company’s ninth anniversary in Jakarta.

www.techinasia.com/gojek-enter-malaysia-philippines-2020

Dan Meyer | Editor-in-Chief January 27, 2020 6:36 PM

Altiostar Networks, NEC, and its subsidiary Netcracker Technology are pooling their resources to crack the 5G open virtual radio access network (vRAN) market. That market is currently dominated by traditional RAN vendors like Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia, and ZTE.

The two firms are also tied to Rakuten Mobile’s plans to launch as a fully virtualized network operator in Japan. Rakuten was a lead investor in Altiostar’s $114 million Series C funding round last year. NEC scored a deal shortly after with Rakuten to jointly develop open vRAN equipment for 5G services.

DC reported in its 2018 “Worldwide 5G Network Infrastructure Forecast” that a large portion of 5G investments will be spent on the RAN, and it estimates that the RAN will grow at a 156.6% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2018 to 2022.

Analysts have cited the company’s aggressive push into the space, including its work with Rakuten Mobile. “Altiostar has beaten them to that in terms of the first global virtualized RAN with Rakuten,” Rajesh Rhai, research director for IDC’s network infrastructure research program, told SDxCentral last year. “Rakuten has kind of been the poster child for virtualized RAN deployment.”

Altiostar has also been grouped alongside a handful of U.S.-based RAN vendors that could benefit from the U.S. government’s ongoing attempts to exclude China-based vendors from 5G networks.

www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/...c-link-to-crack-5g-vran-m

Unidentified Analyst:
„And so you think you have capacity for 12 million users gigabyte per month per day?“

Tareq Amin, Rakuten, Inc. - Group Executive VP & Chief Architecture Officer:
„Yes. Yes. Yes. So let me tell you about the -- because that's a really important point about capacity. We purposely have driven every site that we have, have dark fiber. We have an ability to put 10 gigabit per eNodeB. It's a massive capacity. We own the dark fiber for our backbone. Supports 8 tera of capacity. So on our own network, it's brilliant. I think we are ready. The choke points, I think that someone asked about earlier, is about the radio access because it has a limitation to spectrum. I also feel very optimistic that with 5G, we'll be able to do the necessary data offload. So I feel really, really optimistically that we will not have massive choke points. It does not mean that we underestimate the demand. I think we just need to have the right solution to do this data offload in short-term and midterm as 5G comes.“

global.rakuten.com/corp/investors/...2&category=corp%20ir
Latest IR MaterialsFull Year and Fourth Quarter 2019Download presentation material

dort angegebenen Quelle, sondern ist Bestandteil der Fragen und Antworten im Rahmen des Conference Calls, die textmäßig nur hier enthalten sind:

finance.yahoo.com/news/...ript-4755-t-earnings-011003507.html

Concerned right now is over demand, not under demand

Oliver Matthew from CLSA: „I have 3 questions. The first question, could you -- I know you're going to announce the marketing plan later, the pricing plan. Could you tell us more in terms of the marketing strategy. Obviously, you were very successful with credit card having very low acquisition costs. So will you start targeting the kind of key or e-commerce user base. Is that the right way to think about the marketing?“

Unidentified Company Representative: „So there's a several advantage as our MVNO service business in Japan, right? Obviously, our flexible and scalable and very economically efficient network. We are asking about the flexibility in terms of pricing and also not the pricing, but the service package. The second is Rakuten Group, if you think about not only in card, now Rakuten Bank getting about 6,000 applications per day. Rakuten Life Insurance, growing really fast. So our ability to acquire a customer is unbelievable. So what we are concerned right now is over demand, not under demand. These user are heavy Internet users. So they will buy more, they will use more Rakuten services. The synergy with that is going to be very big.“

finance.yahoo.com/news/...ript-4755-t-earnings-011003507.html

de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/...tzer-ids-bei-viber/

And now 1,150,000 user Dec/19

ViberRevenue: Strong growth in both Telco (Viber in/Out) and content revenue

Total revenue
+29.7% YoY

global.rakuten.com/corp/investors/...2&category=corp%20ir
Latest IR MaterialsFull Year and Fourth Quarter 2019Download presentation material