Rakuten Mobile becoming profitable from 2023
"Building a new mobile network business from scratch, even a fully virtualised one, is hard to do as Japan’s Rakuten Mobile is finding out.
The greenfield operator has just revealed its results for the second quarter (Q2) and first half of 2021. Although the mobile business increased revenue by 29.4% to 107.26 billion yen (US$968 million) in the first six months of the year, it posted a rather eye-watering loss of 197.28 billion yen, compared to a mere 89 billion yen in the previous year. In Q2 alone, revenue rose 17% to 51.5 billion yen while the operating loss amounted to 99.7 billion yen.
Rakuten said the losses were primarily owing to investments in its own 4G network, which achieved 90% population coverage by the end of June. Yoshihisa Yamada, president of Rakuten Mobile, said the operator will not reach its goal to cover 96% of the population by the end of August, blaming the global shortage of semiconductors, but now expects to reach this goal by the end of the year.
Rakuten indicated that operating losses from its mobile business are expected to peak in 2021, with a gradual decline from 2022 onwards and the aim of becoming profitable from 2023. Yamada also said total mobile ‘applications’ amounted to 4.42 million by the end of June 2021, up from 3.51 million at the end of March - this is the cumulative number of applications for the Rakuten Mobile MNO."
www.telecomtv.com/content/open-ran/...ulation-coverage-42168/