The Executive View Point: Rakuten’s Masaya Ueno

By Masaya Ueno, president and Chief Executive Officer, Rakuten Online Shopping

The demands of consumers today are changing and the spheres in which they inhabit and consume for their lifestyle needs are no longer confined. The advent of e-commerce has unlocked a borderless world on the Web for retailers to expand their businesses and provided consumers with broader options for their shopping and service needs.

Rakuten’s market entry into Malaysia is our first greenfield investment that forms part of our global e-commerce expansion. It is the third e-commerce market entry in Southeast Asia following the establishment of Thailand’s TARAD in 2009 and Indonesia’s Rakuten Belanja Online in 2011 through joint-venture and acquisition.

Malaysia is an attractive market owing to its economic stability and well-equipped infrastructure for the development of e-commerce, including internet, logistic and online payment facilities. Among ASEAN, the market presents Rakuten a bright opportunity with the encouraging online shopping trends observed in Malaysia where studies have shown that Malaysians spend on average RM2,461 per person on online shopping in a year.

Rakuten brings a unique approach to the local e-commerce sector where the Business-to-Business-to-Consumer (B2B2C) model introduced by Rakuten is set to empower merchants with the right e-commerce platform, tools and know-how they need to benefit from online business. We aim to be the best go-to partner for medium to large retailers who wish to expand their customer reach to the online marketplace. As we are the only industry player that adopts this model here, we have the first mover advantage in Malaysia to offer a unique yet effective approach to local retailers. We believe our experience in pioneering Rakuten Ichiba and growing it to be the largest online shopping mall in Japan with over 39,000 merchants serves as an invaluable asset to our plans here in Malaysia.

Since announcing our plans to set up Rakuten Online Shopping in Malaysia, we have been actively seeking merchant partners from mid-sized and large retailers across industries in the market. At this point, we are in talks to sign up several retailers as our key merchant and to establish co-marketing campaigns with them in the lead up to the launch of the portal in late 2012. 

We are targeting 30-50 retailers by the first quarter of 2013 spanning across the IT, electronic, games, music, books, fashion, apparels, accessories and luxury goods industries. It is an ongoing process to ensure that we partner quality merchants with a genuine interest in tapping the online market, while we leverage on their brand power to strengthen our credibility in the market.