Hiroshi Mikitani Net Worth

Introduction

When Japanese billionaire Hiroshi Mikitani first started out at the age of 22, many thought he would never succeed.

Hiroshi Mikitani is the CEO and co-founder of Rakuten, a company with headquarters in Japan that has expanded into multiple countries and hit global success.

It’s not just about taking his work and making it into something else. It’s about going back, to finding a business solution in a place where he was born.

Early Life

Hiroshi is a Japanese guy who is CEO of Rakuten.

Hiroshi is a pretty outgoing kid who has a big appetite for life and his friends. His dad and his mom are both economists and he has two younger siblings named Ikuko and Kenichi.

Mikitani was the president of a company called Nippon Wireless, which created and delivered wireless LAN products. He resigned from the company while still being president in the spring of 2004, and started NextGen Technologies Ltd. on May 5th, 2004. The company was founded as an independent venture, and not as a joint venture with Fujitsu Siemens.

This was how he was able to do business in Japan.

Career

Hiroshi was a part of an advertising agency that was not very successful.

RK started as a consultancy in 1997 and went on to become a technology company in the US. They have an operations and technology centre in Yokohama, and an e-commerce operation that is also based in Yokohama. It is the largest of the Rakuten Group’s companies.

This just goes to show Mikitani wasn’t the sort of person to give up on the businesses and jobs he was already working on.

In a time period of about nine years, Steve managed to start two successful small businesses. Even when they fell flat on their faces, he knew what he had to do and kept trying.

Rakuten

Rakuten was founded on 2 November 1999 by Hiroshi Mikitani, Takao Shimizu, Hiroji Okuda, Ichiro Hori and Kuniaki Kato.

Rakuten is a group that contains around 40 different businesses and services, and is based in Nishi-ku in Tokyo.

Rakuten.com and Play.com both help you buy products online. Viber is a communication application that lets you make cheap calls to many other viber devices. Kenko.com is a UK based website that sells a host of branded goods. Aquafadas are a company that is based out of the UK that manufactures outdoor furniture items.

Rakuten was only in Japan, but it got larger and began expanding into the UK, Canada, the US, France and Spain.

Play.com and Viber are investments that have taken a major part in Britain and America’s mobile phone market.

Nowadays, Rakuten is mainly a shopping mall, online retailer, and smartphone/tablet operating app, that has more than 11,000 employees and more than a billion dollars of yearly revenue.

3 Business Lessons from Hiroshi Mikitani

It’s important to identify the core of each project that you are working on and find ways to empower your organization.

1. Emphasize Teamwork

In a collaborative culture, employees are encouraged to give and receive suggestions and solutions. This culture of empowerment helps employees to be creative and innovative, and helps to create a productive and enjoyable work environment.

To each individual, we say: You are not responsible just for yourself. You are responsible for the success of the team. Your individual contributions to the team’s success is not an individual’s success. Your individual success does not benefit the team. Individual success means individual success, and is, by nature, selfish.

2. Allow for Failure

Business is not the same as sports. In sports, you get only a number of chances to succeed. If time runs out or you take three strikes, that’s the end. In business, you can swing as many times as you like.

In both cases, you need to see if the person you are interacting with is comfortable talking to you. Otherwise, you may be wasting your time.

Employees, on the other hand, should have a responsibility to give their leaders the opportunity to show them that their interests will be protected and that they will succeed in their endeavors. If it is not acceptable to the company, it should be acceptable to the employees.

3. Prevent Chaos

We measure everything. We look at many of the things that our retail partners, such as Amazon and Ebay, have to measure. We track the performance of an ecommerce shopping site’s conversion rate, its average order values, its revenue, its profitability, the traffic it sends to the site. You name it, we track it.

We know how much time it takes to push a change to production. We know how many people are impacted by a change in the system. We know how long it takes for users to get the experience they want for their business. We know it’s better to deliver faster with better technology.

Each day at the start of the work day, we will stand up and introduce ourselves and each other. To make it a bit more fun, we will be dressed in business casual, black and white.

Summary

Hiroshi Mikitani is a big fat rich f*ck! He’s worth 9 billion dollars, that’s what he’s always doing! What the f*ck, who the f*ck cares about the guy?!