Q. Not only the stock market, but the industry itself don’t think the Rakuten MNO business
will do well. In the market and in media reports, there is an assumption that the business
won’t go well, but what is it that we aren’t understanding? What appeal does the Japanese
market have? What is the upside appeal?
A. (Amin)
Let me answer your first question about our confidence that this will succeed. I will give you
an analogy of the place I came from in India. Like Rakuten, almost every media doubted our
ability to build a green field network and disrupt the market.
This is the approach that we have taken. First, build simple, next-generation technology. In
Japan, there is no such thing as simplicity and next-generation is still in transformation.
Even something as simple as Voice over LTE (VoLTE), in India, many companies said it will
not work. But VoLTE has a significant cost implication, it is much cheaper to carry voice over
LTE than traditional 3G voice. The technology choices we have made are very elegant. I am
anxious to show you guys. I cannot wait, but I have to hold back. I don’t want the secrets
about what we are working on to go out yet. We’re very confident. The cost implication of
our reduction has everything to do with the technology choices we have made. If you ask
yourself the difference between a software-defined network versus legacy you will start
mapping out clearly our strategy. The technology impact of this network is very different.
What you will see is when we talk about simplicity, simplicity in terms of deployment,
simplicity in terms of construction, simplicity of doing the physical tasks in the field. I am
hopeful sometime in December we could go and show you what is different about this
Rakuten network.
Second, is our business model. In India, we disrupted the business model. When Jio
entered the market in India, in less than 100 days. We put 170 million customers on the
network. It’s common sense. Great technology, great choices, great disruption and business
model. I am fascinated by Japan. I think it’s well overdue for disruption. So we are very
confident. If you wait a little longer, you will see the results of where we are. We want to
accelerate all the deployment plans. You will see some of the solutions we are talking about:
outdoor, indoor network in the core. It is very tough for me to sit here and speak just a little
about what we have done. We are seriously ahead of schedule.
(Yamada)
I myself am communicating with the contractors. They may not be talking about this due to
the duty of confidentiality, but I would like to state that we are making progress.
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