Rakuten wesentlich besser als Rocket

If the valuation of Rakuten Viber would be only the third of the $30 billion = $ 10 billion, that would cover the complete market-cap of Rakuten.  

Users Share Strengths of the Rakuten Saikyo Plan Business

March 15, 2024

Rakuten Mobile hosted an event for users of the Rakuten Mobile Business Plan and other Rakuten Group business partners to announce its growth strategy. The event included an explanation on the expansion of partner solutions to support a range of issues faced by companies, as well as an announcement that the name of the plan would be changed to the "Rakuten Saikyo (Strongest) Plan Business." RNN was also on the scene to speak with companies using the plan to hear about its strengths and what they expect from Rakuten Mobile going forward.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Fj4Aiy1jhg
 

Rakuten Symphony: Cloud native is the future for operators

March 11.03.2024

At MWC2024, Partha Seetala, president of the cloud business unit at Rakuten Symphony, discussed the cloud-native telecom transformation blueprint with TelecomTV and the numerous benefits of the cloud-native approach versus traditional telecom transformation strategies.

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

Rakuten and AT&T Showcase at Mobile World Congress 2024

March 15, 2024

Rakuten Mobile Co-CEO and Rakuten Symphony President Sharad Sriwastawa was joined by Yigal Elbaz, Network CTO of AT&T, for a discussion at the Rakuten Booth moderated by Chetan Sharma during MWC Barcelona 2024 to discuss how Rakuten is helping the brownfield giant consolidate its software and improve its site rollout process through Rakuten Symphony Site Manager.

ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYNAxjeNaaY
 

Rakuten AI S
March 13, 2024
How is Rakuten leveraging AI to transform telecom and power the wider Rakuten Group ecosystem? Rakuten Group's Chief Data Officer Ting Cai was joined by Rakuten Symphony's OSS BU President Rahul Atri and Rakuten Mobile Chief Data and AI officer Madhukiran Medithe to discuss Rakuten?s transformative ?AI-nization? mindset and the potential for AI and automation to upend industries.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JYcteS1QV4
 

Idea of the Week: Rakuten Group, a Rare Opportunity to Capture 9% Return (New on Bond Express)

Rakuten's operations and credit profile improved to varying degrees last year, and the bond's risk-return profile was attractive enough for investors interested in Japanese corporate bonds

Published on 04 Mar 2024

Highlights:

Rakuten's operating performance improved across the board in FY23, with the e-commerce and financial services segments growing at a high-quality and rapid pace. Loss in the mobile telecom sector notably narrowed and the group is expected to reach the breakeven points from 2025 onwards. We are positive about the group's prospects.

Given the early stage development of mobile telecom, the high capital expenditure results in somewhat tight liquidity. Owing to a decent capability of refinancing, Rakuten raised a large amount of funds in FY23 through equity financing and the IPO of a subsidiary. Considering that the group owns a lot of valuable assets. Including Rakuten securities and Rakuten life insurance, either through IPOs or equity sales are potential sources of liquidity. Coupled with the fact that entering into a profitable position of the telecommunication mobile telecom is just around the corner with a lower cash bleeding, we believe the overall credit risk remained at a manageable level.

Based on the group's favorable prospects and relatively sound credit quality, we believe the investment risk of bond due in 2027 is still under control. The bond is currently yielding roughly 9%, which is one of the highest levels among BB-rated issuers. It also represents a rate investment opportunity in the Japanese high-yield space, we thus add it to Bond Express so that investors can gain access to it at a lower cost.

https://www.bondsupermart.com/bsm/article-detail/...press-RCMS_289040
 

The most important message from source in the last posting

Full-scale Improvement in Operation and EBTIDA Turns Around to Profitability
Speaking of the operation results in 2023, the total revenue amounted to JPY 2.3 trillion, up 7.8% from one year ago. Meanwhile, the group is finally out of the red, with EBITDA improving from a loss of around JPY 70 billion in 2022 to earnings of JPY 118.1 billion in 2023. Although the EBITDA loss of JPY 180 billion for the mobile telecom sector suggests ongoing headwinds, we still favor the overall performance of the group in 2023, which beat the market expectations with a significant improvement.
 

Rakuten and 1&1 Showcase at Mobile World Congress 2024

March 14, 2024

In conversation: 1&1 Mobilfunk CEO Michael Martin & Rakuten Symphony Chief Business Officer Rabih Dabboussi at MWC Barcelona 2024 Find out how 1&1's unique mobile network architecture - designed, deployed and operated by Rakuten Symphony - is enabling better performance and openness, creating new possibilities for 1&1's 12 million mobile customers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNzfII-uaWc
 

Wie hat sich das größte Affiliate-Netzwerk Rakuten weiterentwickelt ?

Das Rakuten Affiliate Network bleibt für uns auch im Jahr 2024 eine der führenden Plattformen für Affiliate-Marketing. Mit kontinuierlichen Verbesserungen, einer Vielzahl von Partnerprogrammen und erweiterten Funktionen ist es eine attraktive Option sowohl für Advertiser als auch für Publisher. Wenn ihr nach einer Möglichkeit sucht, online Geld zu verdienen oder Euer Produkte zu bewerben, könnte das Rakuten Affiliate Network die richtige Wahl für Euch sein.

https://digital-hessen.de/...iliate-netzwerk-rakuten-weiterentwickelt
 

MARCH 15, 2024 12.42 EUROPE/LONDON BY BROADBAND TV NEWS CORRESPONDENT

Rakuten has reached a new agreement with A+E Networks EMEA to launch multiple FAST Channels on its platform.

In the UK, the RTV Biography Channel launches focussing on the real-life stories of fascinating people from history, sports, movies and more.

In Spain, Gipsy Kings is a new channel focussing on the popular reality show that follows the day-to-day life of four well-known gypsy dynasties.

Italy see?s the launch of RTV Dantascienza in Italy, a binge-watching paradise for sci-fi fans, with iconic and blockbuster movies from Hollywood and leading European studios.

In France, The Satisfaction Group Channels (Les Anges, Les Secrets de Nos Regions, Qui Veut Gagner de Millions?, Les Z?amours and Le Meilleur d?Arthur) have been launched.

Rakuten TV has over 100 owned and operated channels in Europe across multiple genres, including Film, Documentary, Series, Kids, Reality, Crime and News.

https://www.broadbandtvnews.com/2024/03/15/...fast-channel-portfolio/
 

For Kobo, Asia has the biggest growth potential for e-books

14 March 2024 By Sovan Mandal

Rakuten Kobo, a leading e-book platform, continues its global expansion with the launch of the Kobo Plus subscription service in Taiwan. This move marks a significant step in tapping into Asia?s burgeoning e-book market, which CEO Michael Tamblyn believes holds immense growth potential.
The introduction of subscription-based services in Taiwan and other markets reflects Rakuten Kobo?s commitment to breaking down barriers to e-book adoption. Drawing from successful experiences in Europe and the United States, where subscription services have attracted a significant number of new e-book readers, the company aims to replicate this success in Asia.

With a vast collection of Chinese books and operations spanning 190 countries and 77 languages, Rakuten Kobo is well-positioned to cater to diverse literary preferences worldwide. As the e-book market continues to evolve, Rakuten Kobo remains at the forefront, driving innovation and empowering readers to discover the joy of digital reading.

https://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/...wth-potential-for-e-books
 

Rakuten has the biggest percentage of the owners of Cabify

FINANCIALS of Cabify

       USD      2021      2022§2023 e 2024 e 2025 e
  Revenues      521m      688m      998m      1.4b      2.1b§
% growth - 32 % 45 % 45 % 45 %

https://app.dealroom.co/companies/cabify
 

Rakuten International Showcase at MWC Barcelona 2024

March 13, 2024

Rakuten International CEO Amit Patel, Rakuten Viber CEO Ofir Eyal and Rakuten TV CEO & President Cédric Dufour speak at Mobile World Congress 2024 about Rakuten International?s diverse range of businesses, offering insights into their innovative content services, messaging app offerings, and the relevant synergies they have been able to build with partners.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5p1m8Xsl0g
 

"Rakuten Viber has 700 million Monthly Active Users (MAU's)"  

- with 900 million Monthly Aktive Users a little above the numbers of Viber - and should be valued in an IPO with $30 billion after the following source:

"Speaking to the UK's Financial Times, Telegram boss Pavel Durov expressed hope the company might become profitable in 2024 or 2025, meaning listing its shares would be a distinct possibility in the near future.
The company passed 700 million users in 2022. According to Durov, it now stands at 900 million users. If that growth is sustained, a figure of 1 billion before the end of 2024 is possible.
According to Durov, potential investors have offered the company valuations in the order of $30 billion, although it is currently considering a possible IPO."

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/12/...2520public%2520channels.%22



 

and a lot of more positive aspects.  

https://payment.rakuten.co.jp/news/2024031800/
 

Q4/23 Non-GAPP Operating income significantly improved YoY from negative 72.6 billion JPY in Q4/22 to near flat, only negative 3.6 billion JPY, in Q4/23.

https://global.rakuten.com/corp/investors/  

Masters Card's growth.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/...buffett-stocks-could-111500741.html  

AI Revolutionizes Search Tech for Rakuten E-Commerce

March 18, 2024

To improve the relevancy of product searches on its e-commerce platforms, Rakuten is implementing an AI-powered deep learning technology called semantic search. This technology enables understanding of a search query's meaning rather than just matching keywords. The first platforms to utilize semantic search are Rakuten Fashion and Rakuten Ichiba, with an immediate impact including no-match searches being reduced to less than 1%.

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

Rakuten Symphony launches Telco Cloud training through TIP Academy

https://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2024/mar/...ugh-tip-academy/
 

Rakuten Group Showcase & Rakuten Symphony Showcase [MWC Barcelona 2024]

February 28, 2024

The Rakuten Group Showcase and the Rakuten Symphony Showcase were held at the Rakuten Group booth at MWC Barcelona 2024. Chairman Hiroshi Mikitani speaks at the beginning of the Rakuten Group Showcase. *Subtitles and others may be incorrect due to automatic transcription and translation by AI. Please understand. *The amount of money shown in the video is calculated based on the exchange rate at the time the video was edited. *We may receive compensation (associate or affiliate) from the links in the summary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ISzKST27N0
 

Valuation of Rakuten Viber in compare to $ 30 billon for Telegram?

https://www.androidheadlines.com/2024/03/...ty-900-million-users.html

 

Rakuten Releases High-Performance Open Large Language Models Optimized for the Japanese Language

- Foundation model and instruct model achieve top average score among open Japanese LLMs in LM Evaluation Harness benchmark.

Tokyo, March 21, 2024 ? Rakuten Group, Inc. has released high performance open Japanese large language models (LLMs): a foundation model Rakuten AI 7B and an instruct model Rakuten AI 7B Instruct to the open source community. Rakuten has also released a chat model Rakuten AI 7B Chat based on a version of the instruct model and fine-tuned on chat data for conversational text generation.

Rakuten AI 7B is a 7 billion parameter Japanese language foundation model that has been developed by continually training Mistral-7B-v0.1, an open LLM from France-based AI startup Mistral AI. Training of the model was carried out on an in-house multi-node GPU cluster engineered by Rakuten to enable the rapid and scalable training of models on large, complex datasets. Rakuten AI 7B Instruct is an instruct model fine-tuned from the Rakuten AI 7B foundation model.

All the models are released under the Apache 2.0 license and are available from the official Rakuten Group Hugging Face repository.

Characteristics of the LLM

1. High performance through training on high-quality data
The models have been continually trained from the Mistral-7B-v0.1 model on English and Japanese internet-scale datasets. These datasets have been carefully curated and cleaned through an in-house multi-stage data filtering and annotation process to ensure the quality, contributing to the high performance of the models.

2. High efficiency through extended tokenizer
The models also use an extended tokenizer optimized for Japanese language characters. In the extended tokenizer, a single token now represents more characters than before, enabling cost-efficient text processing during model training as well as inference.

3. Top performance among open Japanese LLMs
The foundation and instruct models were evaluated on both Japanese and English language performance via LM Evaluation Harness. For Japanese, the foundation model achieves an average score of 69.8 points, and the instruct model 77.3 points. For English, the scores are 60.5 for the foundation model and 61.3 for the instruct model. These scores place the models at the top among the open Japanese language LLMs in their respective categories.

?At Rakuten, we want to leverage the best tools to solve our customers? problems. We have a broad portfolio of tools, including proprietary models and our own data science and machine learning models developed over the years. This enables us to provide the most suitable tool for each use case in terms of cost, quality and performance,? commented Ting Cai, Chief Data Officer of Rakuten Group. ?With Rakuten AI 7B, we have reached an important milestone in performance and are excited to share our learnings with the open-source community and accelerate the development of Japanese language LLMs.?

All models can be used commercially for various text generation tasks such as summarizing content, answering questions, general text understanding, and building dialogue systems. In addition, the models can be used as a base for building other models.

Large language models are the core technology powering the Generative AI services that have sparked the recent revolution in AI. Rakuten?s current models have been developed for research purposes, and the company will continue to evaluate various options to deliver the best service to its customers. By developing models in-house, Rakuten can build up its knowledge and expertise in LLMs and create models that are optimized to support the Rakuten Ecosystem. By making the models open, Rakuten aims to contribute to the open source community and promote the further development of Japanese language LLMs.

With breakthroughs in AI triggering transformations across industries, Rakuten has launched its AI-nization initiative, implementing AI in every aspect of its business to drive further growth. Rakuten is committed to making AI a force for good that augments humanity, drives productivity and fosters prosperity.

https://global.rakuten.com/corp/news/press/2024/0321_01.html
 

I believe, Rakuten is the top AI stock to buy beyond the "Magnificent Seven"