Hiroshi Mikitani
Rakuten
Japan’s largest e-commerce marketplace, later expanded into fintech, telecom and content · Tokyo, Japan
Portrait: 桃園市政府新聞處 / Wikimedia Commons, Attribution
The founder
Hiroshi Mikitani, born in Kobe in 1965, studied at Hitotsubashi University and earned an MBA at Harvard Business School before spending years at the Industrial Bank of Japan. The 1995 Kobe earthquake, which devastated his hometown, pushed him to leave banking; he founded MDM, Inc. in February 1997 with three co-founders and $250,000, launching the Rakuten Ichiba online marketplace two months later with just 6 employees and 13 merchants.
How it was taken public
Rakuten listed on the JASDAQ exchange on April 19, 2000, formalizing its transition from scrappy startup to public company (the exact amount raised isn’t reliably documented in available records for this early listing). It later moved to the Tokyo Stock Exchange main board and grew into one of Japan’s largest internet conglomerates — spanning e-commerce, banking, insurance and mobile telecom — with Mikitani instituting company-wide "Englishnization" in 2010 to globalize operations.
Sourced & verified
In the news
Coverage of the Rakuten deal from independent outlets — read the original reporting, not just our summary.
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