1. How Rakuten is planning to run their
entire business in English?
s1180023 Kentaro Sekine

2. Outline
● What is Rakuten?
● Strategy
● Problem
● Other company's opinion
● Summary
● References

3. What is Rakuten?
● Rakuten is a company in Japan that is providing
the Internet synthesis service including the
Internet shopping.
● There are about 66 million members of the
group in Rakuten.
● It was established by current chairman's Hiroshi
Mikitani in 1997.

4. What is Rakuten?
● Rakuten forms the Rakuten group, and is the
center company.
● It developed the EC business, the credit card
business, the activities banking, the portal
media business, the travel business, the bond
business, and the professional sports business
in the group.

5. Strategy
● Rakuten made English an official language in
July, 2012.
● Even if the foreigner is not attending the
meeting, it speaks in English.
● The president said that the employee who was
not able to speak English in two years would be
fired.

6. Strategy
● The employee should be able to speak English
so that Rakuten may aim to expand overseas
sales.
● The Rakuten employee has applied for the
lesson from an English language school.
● In addition, it is necessary to achieve a high
score with TOEIC.

7. Problem
● The problem is that Rakuten employees are
under a lot of pressure to study English.
● It is a big problem to fire the person because
the employee who cannot speak English is out
of the question.

8. Other company's opinion
● There is a person who agrees and disagrees
that it makes English an official language.
● A certain person says that it should improve
employee's English.
● A certain person says that it need not speak in
English if there are a lot of Japanese in the
meeting.

9. Summary
● Rakuten made English an official language last
year.
● A lot of employees have applied for the lesson
while being under a lot of pressure to study
English.
● There are a lot of people who think it is
necessary to expand overseas sales though
there are pros and cons in this idea.

10. References
● http://www.rakuten.co.jp/
● http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2010/07/16/news
● http://corp.rakuten.co.jp/careers/business/strategy/