Rakuten wesentlich besser als Rocket

Rakuten Viber / GSMA Livestream: Business messaging for brands challenges & trends (January 2022)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8ryj4YYNgU  

Rakuten Symphony hopes European expansion will accelerate Open RAN adoption

February 14, 2022

Rakuten Symphony, the mobile network technology and service arm of the Japanese giant, is establishing new operations in the UK, France, and Germany in a bid to secure more of the European telco market and encourage the adoption of Open RAN.

The UK operation will be based in London and will focus on the development of 4G and 5G Open RAN software and hardware. OpenRAN is a vendor-neutral approach to Radio Access Network (RAN) with standardised designs that allow a variety of firms to supply hardware and software.

This means operators benefit from increased innovation from a wider range of suppliers, reduced costs, and greater flexibility because the threat of vendor lock-in is reduced. The company hopes the investment in R&D will put it in a better position to help the UK government meet its target of 35% of all UK mobile traffic carried by Open RAN by the end of the decade.

The French site will be based in Paris, supported by an existing technology centre in Montpellier, and the German unit will call Dusseldorf home.

https://americannewstimes.com/news/tech/...elerate-open-ran-adoption/  

By Rakuten Advertising | February 15, 2022 | MARKETING STRATEGIES

https://blog.rakutenadvertising.com/...rtisers-affiliate-performance/  

184,6 Mrd. Yen = $ 1.6 billion
Aufgrund strategischer Investitionen in zukünftiges Wachstum, einschließlich des vorzeitigen Ausbaus des Rakuten Mobile Servicebereichs im Segment Mobile, verzeichnete die Rakuten Gruppe einen Non-GAAP-Betriebsverlust von 225,0 Milliarden Yen (etwa 1,7 Mrd. Euro). Ohne Berücksichtigung einmaliger operativer Posten wie Investitionen in den Bereichen Mobile und Logistik sowie Gewinnschwankungen im Investmentgeschäft, die auf starke Marktschwankungen zurückzuführen sind, belief sich das Non-GAAP-Betriebsergebnis auf 184,6 Mrd. Yen, was einem Anstieg von +23,8 % gegenüber dem Vorjahr entspricht. Mit der Ausweitung des Rakuten Mobile Servicebereichs wird erwartet, dass sich die Rentabilität des Segments Mobile ab dem zweiten Quartal des GJ2022 verbessern wird.

https://www.google.de/...YogBpAGSAQEymAEAoAEBsAEK&sclient=gws-wiz
 

https://www.klamm.de/news/...roup-fy2021-und-q4-fy2021-14N208621.html
 

Additional to my last posting

A net-income of $1.6 billion are by a extreme low P/E of 25 for a combination of e-commerce and fintech a market-cap of $40 billion.  

I believe that the negative operative cash flow from operations in 2021 of Rakuten will turn to flat or positive positions in 2022.

The addition of the negative profit loss of 224,504 millions of Yen in the FY 2021 and the 168,188 million depreciation = negative operative cash flow from operations of 56,316 million Yen or about 490 million in the FY 2021.

Internet Services FinTech Mobile Total (Millions of Yen)
Segment revenue 1,003,382 619,048 227,511 1,849,941
Segment profit (loss) 107,548 89,120 (421,172) (224,504)
Depreciation and amortization 33,384 51,080 83,724 168,188

global.rakuten.com/corp/investors/documents/results/
Downloads/21Q4tanshin_E.pdf  

Excluding non-recurring operational items such as investment in the Mobile and Logistics businesses and profit fluctuations in the Investment business driven by large market fluctuations, Non-GAAP operating income was 184.6 billion yen, an increase of +23.8% YoY.

In FY2021, the Rakuten Group recorded revenue growth in all three segments: Internet Services, FinTech and Mobile. Consolidated revenue achieved double-digit growth, up +15.5% year-on-year (YoY), totaling 1.68 trillion yen. In addition, global gross transaction value (GTV) was 26.9 trillion yen, up +20.5% YoY.

In Q4 FY2021, the average number of monthly active users across the Rakuten Group in Japan grew +12.2% YoY, and the percentage of users who use more than one service reached a record high of 74.7%. In addition, 35% of Rakuten Mobile subscribers who had not previously used a Rakuten service began using Rakuten Ichiba within one year of signing up for the mobile service. As cross-use between Rakuten Mobile and other Rakuten services continues to grow, the Rakuten Ecosystem as a whole is expected to deliver further growth.

Due to strategic investment in future growth including the buildout of the Rakuten Mobile service area ahead of plan in the Mobile segment, the Rakuten Group recorded Non-GAAP operating losses of 225.0 billion yen. Excluding non-recurring operational items such as investment in the Mobile and Logistics businesses and profit fluctuations in the Investment business driven by large market fluctuations, Non-GAAP operating income was 184.6 billion yen, an increase of +23.8% YoY. With the expansion of the Rakuten Mobile service area, Mobile segment profitability is expected to improve from the second quarter of FY2022.

https://www.communicationstoday.co.in/...q4-fy2021-financial-results/
 

Rakuten Medical and Shimadzu Enroll First Patient in the U.S. Clinical Trial of Photoimmunotherapy

Feb 15, 2022

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/...unotherapy-301483186.html
 

Rakuten Symphony is not a services company, is not a telecom hardware company. It’s a telecom platform company.

Symphony is not a services company, is not a telecom hardware company. It’s a telecom platform company.

Europe is now a clear focus for Rakuten Symphony. In addition to its banner customers at 1&1 Drillisch in Germany, the head of its Digital Experience business unit is based in France. Conversations with Telefonica, also one of the largest and most active open RAN champions across multiple countries, sound more than promising. A tie-up between Telefonica and Rakuten Symphony would be a significant development in the market. Telefonica is one of the operators who has made a public commitment regarding diverting spend from conventional RAN to open RAN – not simply running PoCs and pilots.

Worldwide, Symphony is now having many more conversations with brownfield operators than greenfield.

But it does not count the likes of Nokia and Ericsson as rivals. Quite the reverse: Amin is key to emphasis the opportunities for these companies that working with Rakuten Symphony could offer. Nokia is already a supplier for Rakuten Mobile’s 4G radio units. Symphony is not a services company, is not a telecom hardware company. It’s a telecom platform company.

https://appledoreresearch.com/2022/02/14/rakuten-symphony-tunes-up/  

Symworld – put simply – allows 200 people to run a network that conventionally would take thousands
Symware & Symworld

Originally trailed back in October 2021, Symware is the result of some of that four-year learning process: an appliance that enables Radio-as-a-Service as a commercial model. Built using commodity hardware,
Symware is optimized to meet the demands of telecom workloads. It contains “no magic”, but of course that is precisely the point. It is the operational expertise and automation capabilities that Symphony has been perfecting that make such a device possible.

Symworld represents Symphony’s wider proposition and ambition: a vision for a complete, coherent set of software capabilities required to plan, build and operate advanced, cloud-native networks at scale. Unlike the siloed, verticalized, procurement and deployment (and endless systems integration) that has characterized telecom for the past 30 years, Symworld – put simply – allows 200 people to run a network that conventionally would take thousands.

Rakuten is keen for Symworld to be a channel for third parties to sell their offerings through. In the near term however, it is focused on the technologies and applications that it has direct control over.

https://appledoreresearch.com/2022/02/14/rakuten-symphony-tunes-up/  

Rakuten is one of the owners and one of the clients of Robin.io

Robin.io Partners with Lekha Wireless and Blue Arcus to accelerate highly scalable custom carrier-grade network solutions

San Jose, California, Feb 17, 2022 - (ACN Newswire) - Robin.io, a provider of hyper-converged Telco-Grade cloud-native Kubernetes platform, simplifying enterprises and 5G service delivery infrastructure, announces a strategic collaboration to offer Automation and Orchestration capabilities for the disaggregated 5G market. The partnership with Lekha Wireless and Blue Arcus enables IoT, Private/Enterprise Networks, MEC use cases and facilitates Industry 4.0 use cases.

With over 70+ U.S. patents in the areas of application and infrastructure awareness, application orchestration, storage architecture, and data management, Robin.io aims to accelerate highly scalable custom carrier-grade cloud-native solutions.

https://en.acnnewswire.com/press-release/english/...network-solutions  

Rakuten Symphony looked incredibly healthy with $3 billion in bookings

Rakuten Symphony poises for disruption with Symworld

By Dean Ramsay, Principal Analyst, TM Forum February, 2022

On the call with press and analysts this week, Rakuten Symphony announced that its sales pipeline looked incredibly healthy with $3 billion in bookings, and also revealed its latest development in its cloud-native operations journey: Symworld, an app store for building telecoms networks.

This is apparently the realization of a long-held ambition for Tareq Amin, Chief Technology Officer at Rakuten Group and Rakuten Symphony CEO, and will see Symphony customers buying cloud-native apps for OSS, engineering tasks, network management knowledge and people management, or whatever they need to build and run a network.

https://inform.tmforum.org/...ny-poises-for-disruption-with-symworld/  

This year, however, Rakuten Symphony is taking a different approach. Hot off the heels of major announcements this week about Symworld — a platform to help telecom operators scale at the speed of cloud — and ambitious European expansion, Rakuten Symphony will seek to challenge the traditional industry approach to “what’s new,” with a busy schedule of product demonstrations, panels, presentations and news announcements.

Expert opinions available live and streamed

Outside of the Rakuten Symphony Telco Transformation Lab, company leaders will also participate in panel presentations and video interviews throughout the conference. These include:

OpenRAN: A Vision of 5G & the Future of 6G

Monday, February 28: 13:15 – 14:15 CET; MWC Stage A, Hall 5

5G is growing fast — 2 billion connections are predicted by 2025. One driver of this rapid rollout is Open RAN-based solutions. “OpenRAN: A Vision of 5G & the Future of 6G” will bring a panel of industry experts together to discuss the benefits of Open RAN for 5G and for coming 6G networks.

Featuring: Azita Arvani, general manager of Rakuten Symphony Americas

https://rakuten.today/blog/...co-transformation-to-mwc-barcelona.html  

Even after factoring in the impact from last year’s Go To Travel campaign, the continued growth of Rakuten’s e-commerce businesses, centered on Rakuten Ichiba, led to strong growth in both revenue and operating income.

Revenue = + 12.7% YoY

Operating Income = + 28.6% YoY

*1 Domestic e-commerce = Rakuten Ichiba, Rakuten Travel, Rakuten Books, Rakuten Books network, Rakuten Kobo (domestic), golf business, Rakuten Fashion, Rakuten Dream businesses, Rakuten Beauty, Rakuten 24 and other direct daily necessities shops, Logistics, auto business, Rakuma, Rakuten Rebates, Rakuten Seiyu Netsuper, cross border trading, etc.

*2 From Q4/21, Rakuten Books network, cross border trading, Rakuten Kobo (domestic) and Rakuten Magazine were transferred from the Others segment to the Domestic EC segment. This has resulted in retroactive adjustments to Domestic E Commerce revenue and operating income.

global.rakuten.com/corp/investors/documents/results/
Downloads/21Q4videoPPT_E.pdf  

Cabify erwägt den Börsengang als Option zur Stärkung seines Wachstums

CARLOS LÓPEZ

· 14/02/2022 06:45

Die spanische Multimobilitätsplattform Cabify erwägt den Börsengang als Option, um sich weiter zu stärken und zu wachsen, so David Pérez, Senior Vice President of People, Sustainability and Public Affairs des Unternehmens in einem Interview mit OKDIARIO, obwohl er keinen Zeithorizont für die Durchführung einer solchen Operation anbot und andere mögliche Finanzierungsinstrumente nicht ausschloss.

Das Unternehmen verspürt derzeit keine Dringlichkeit, irgendeine Art von Transaktion durchzuführen, um sich selbst zu finanzieren, nachdem es 2019 die Rentabilität erreicht hat. "Dies ermöglicht es uns, nicht auf ständige Finanzierungsrunden angewiesen zu sein, was unsere Autonomie erhöht", erklärte Pérez. Tatsächlich hat cabify es geschafft, sich jahrelang zu behaupten, ohne eine neue Runde unter den Investoren zu drehen, was für viele Startups schwierig ist. Die letzte war im Jahr 2018, als die Muttergesellschaft Maxi Mobility laut Quellen in der Branche 160 Millionen Dollar sammelte. Dank dieser Fähigkeit zur Selbstversorgung kann das Unternehmen, das vom seaya Ventures-Fonds und dem japanischen E-Commerce-Riesen Rakuten kontrolliert wird, "jede Verhandlung mit einer Position der Stärke gegenüber potenziellen Investoren führen", sagte Pérez, daher ist der Börsengang für die Gruppe kein Ziel als solches.

Derzeit ist Cabify in Spanien in 10 Städten tätig, die das höchste Einwohneraufkommen aufweisen: A Coruña, Santander, Barcelona, Zaragoza, Alicante, Valencia, Murcia, Malaga, Sevilla und Madrid. Ebenso hat es sich schon sehr früh für Lateinamerika entschieden und ist in Kolumbien, Argentinien, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay und Mexiko präsent.

Insgesamt trägt das Geschäftsmodell von Cabify Früchte, obwohl die Pandemie in Spanien zu einer historischen Einsperrung geführt hat, die die Aktivitäten von Menschen und Unternehmen verändert hat. Das Unternehmen, das seine offiziellen Ergebnisse noch nicht veröffentlicht hat, schätzt, dass sein Umsatz im Jahr 2021 516 Millionen Dollar betrug, 45% mehr als im Jahr 2020.

https://okdiario.com/economia/...-opcion-reforzar-crecimiento-8564852  

Value of the about 40% ownership of Rakuten on Cabify is higher than $1 billion.  

Rakuten Mobile reported a 31.9% year-on-year increase in annual revenues of 227.5 billion Japanese yen (US$2 billion) for 2021, with an unspecified portion of those revenues coming from the now operationally independent but still wholly-owned Rakuten Symphony, which is now selling its tech and systems integration wares to any network operator that’s ready to deploy an Open RAN architecture. However, due to the ongoing furious investment in the operator’s 4G and 5G networks in Japan, which now reach 96% of the Japanese population, Rakuten Mobile reported an eye-watering full year loss of 421.2 billion yen ($3.69 billion). But the worst is almost over, according to Rakuten, which says earnings are expected to improve (which means, losses will be smaller) from the second quarter of this year. Rakuten Mobile currently has 5.5 million paying mobile customers either signed up to its own services or via its MVNO arrangement with KDDI. Importantly for the Rakuten Group, which has operations across multiple verticals, “35% of Rakuten Mobile subscribers who had not previously used a Rakuten service began using Rakuten Ichiba [e-commerce platform] within one year of signing up for the mobile service. As cross-use between Rakuten Mobile and other Rakuten services continues to grow, the Rakuten Ecosystem as a whole is expected to deliver further growth.” That has been Rakuten’s strategy all along – not just to develop a mobile services business, but develop a mobile services business that is part of, and integrated with, a broader set of services that drives greater overall share of spending and enhanced loyalty. Will it work? Rakuten’s counting on it, obviously, having gambled billions on the move, but you can bet that every major telecoms company around the world is also watching the trends, stats and business modelling like a hawk. In the meantime, Rakuten is expanding its Symphony business, with plans to hire hundreds of additional staff in Europe. As for the Rakuten Group overall, the losses incurred by Rakuten Mobile meant the company incurred a full year operating loss of 225 billion yen ($1.94 billion), even though Group revenues increased by 15.5% to 1,681 billion yen ($14.5 billion). For further details on Rakuten's financial performance, see this announcement, and then read our story on what's happening at Rakuten Symphony: Rakuten Symphony unveils ‘Symworld’ and expands in Europe.

https://www.telecomtv.com/content/...sco-splunk-rakuten-mobile-43603/  

Improved Profitability of Other Internet Services (Excluding gain/loss from minority investment)

Profitability improved due to cost reductions achieved through business concentration and selections made by Business Portfolio Committee, and gradual return to normal business activity. This has led to significant profitability improvements across Other Internet Services.

Operating income of other Internet services, excluding investment gains or losses, continues to improve.

Cost reductions were achieved through business focus and selection.

In addition, sports businesses negatively affected by the pandemic saw some recovery and contributed to the bottom line.

In the overseas businesses, Rakuten Rewards has seen a strong return to profit generation.

And Viber is now in a position to drive stable profits.

global.rakuten.com/corp/investors/documents/results/  

Rakuten’s Fintech is well undervalued versus other global and domestic peers

Here is Rakuten’s FinTech Valuation. Considering 5 years revenue CAGR and PE ratio, Rakuten is well undervalued versus other global and domestic peers. We will promote the strengths of the Fintech Ecosystem and its growth potential backed by our competitiveness.

global.rakuten.com/corp/investors/documents/results/

Downloads/21Q4videoPPT_S_E.pdf  

FinTech Highlights

The FinTech segment achieved higher revenue and profit compared to last year, as customer bases expanded and usage as a main service increased for each service. Rakuten Card secured an increase in profits led by the strong acquisition of members and an increase in transaction value due to the recovery in offline consumption.

Rakuten Card surpassed 25 million cards issued, Rakuten Bank and Rakuten Securities surpassed
12 million* and 7 million accounts respectively.

Rakuten Card’s shopping transaction value growth rate outperformed the industry, increasing
25.3% YoY in FY2021.

Cross-use of Rakuten FinTech services gaining momentum: Percentage of customers using all
three services – Rakuten Card, Rakuten Bank and Rakuten Securities – grew 89.4% YoY.

global.rakuten.com/corp/investors/documents/results/
Downloads/21Q4videoPPT_S_E.pdf
 

The successful cloud providers use their own services first then sell them to others and Rakuten Symphony is the first telecom company to do the same

Rakuten’s pitch — making a RAN intelligent controller, open RAN functions and services, security, service assurance, and operations and business support services available as a platform — could certainly gain traction among carriers that want to pursue open RAN without the challenge of purchasing and integrating individual products and services.

The company’s largest customer to date comes in the form of another greenfield operator, Germany’s 1&1 Drillisch, which inked a deal with Rakuten to build a 5G open RAN. Rakuten Symphony claims it can help operators shorten site commissioning times from weeks to minutes, delivering a 40% lower capex, decrease network opex by 30% compared to traditional frameworks, and introduce new features at least 10 times faster.

“The platform can modernize any network and move operations from being coordinated by people and paper to being driven by software and data. And it’s about time,” Rakuten Symphony CEO Tareq Amin wrote in a blog post.

“The successful cloud providers use their own services first then sell them to others. Rakuten Symphony is the first telecom company to do the same in the cloud-native era and as we have seen that the possible outcomes are transformational,” he added.

https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/...surpass-1b-in-q4/2022/02/  

um den Einstandspreis weiter zu verbilligen.  

das Geringste antizipiert:

Mobile Segment Outlook

Loss will bottom out in Q1/22, and start to shrink from Q2/22, due to roaming cost reduction, and more paying users who will complete the one-year free campaign.

Main improvement factors

Increase in paying users: Customers who applied for the 1-year free campaign which ended on April 8, 2021, will convert to paying users in sequence.


Acceleration of subscriber acquisition: Improvement of competitive environment (elimination of cancellation fees at other carriers, carrier mail portability), and improvement of network construction status will contribute.

Roaming cost reduction: Scheduled to switch roaming services sequentially from April 2022

global.rakuten.com/corp/investors/documents/results/
Downloads/21Q4CEOPPT_E.pdf
 

Ad revenue in 2021 grew strongly to JPY 157.9 bn (+22.0% YoY), contributing to improvement of Rakuten Group’s profit margin. Ad revenue from leading consumer goods manufacturers and other major brands grew due to accelerated digital transformation. Ad revenue from main clients on Rakuten Ichiba grew +35.1% YoY in 2021. Aiming for further growth by utilizing diverse data of Rakuten Group and new statistical data from Rakuten Mobile to capture the market opportunity for Online to Offline (O2O) .

Marketing

Rakuten’s advertising revenue increased significantly in 2021, due to the expansion of online advertising amid the acceleration of digital transformation. The revenue growth rate has been even higher than our domestic e commerce business's rate, contributing to an improvement in the profit margin.

In particular, ad placements by major consumer goods manufacturers grew significantly in 2021. This was due to the expansion of O2O efforts aimed at mutual online and offline customer transfers, while leveraging online ads that can measure effectiveness. Internal ad inventory, and ad revenue from the external ad sector, are accelerating year by year, maintaining very high growth rates.

global.rakuten.com/corp/investors/documents/results/
Downloads/21Q4videoPPT_S_E.pdf