The less bumpy way to ride e-commerce = Rakuten

[FlankerStan]

Rakuten Pay Send Pair Happy

https://payment.rakuten.co.jp/news/2024042600/

[FlankerStan]

Progress on the financial front

In a situation where there have been concerns about the large amount of corporate bonds due for redemption in FY2024 and FY2025, the Company issued USD-denominated senior notes in February 2024 to purchase foreign bonds maturing in 2024 while also announcing the offer to purchase yen denominated bonds scheduled to mature in or after 2024. Moreover, it issued USD 2 billion in USD denominated senior notes due 2029 on April 10, 2024, which, together with the bonds to be issued as detailed below, will be used for the redemption/repurchase of the senior notes maturing in or after 2024. Meanwhile, the Company announced the reorganization of the FinTech business on April 1, 2024, which JCR assumes will contribute to financial improvement to a certain extent.

https://www.jcr.co.jp/download/82869f0228ea1354aaf01669e9093…

[FlankerStan]

Rakuten Mobile Leads Japanese Competitors in Mobile Game Experience and Fastest 5G Speed Categories

Opensignal’s April 2024 Mobile Network Experience Report names Rakuten Mobile a leader among Japan’s mobile operators in five network performance categories

Tokyo, April 25, 2024 - Rakuten Mobile, Japan’s newest and most modern mobile network, is recognized by Opensignal, global provider of network experience and market performance insights, as the country’s leading mobile network service provider across five network performance areas.

Opensignal’s April 2024 Mobile Network Experience Report shows Rakuten Mobile as Japan’s leader in the Games Experience, 5G Upload Speed, 5G Download Speed, Upload Speed Experience and Voice App Experience categories.

https://corp.mobile.rakuten.co.jp/english/news/press/2024/04…

[FlankerStan]

T&T uses Rakuten software for huge network modernisation project

By Keith Dyer 18 March 2024

Elbaz said, “We keep talking about Open and Cloud RAN the excitement of the architecture – but real life is building the network. For a network of our size, nationwide across north America, that takes a lot of effort and planning. We were at the point in that process of site build and design that required us traversing several systems, many of them out there for several years. Rakuten Symphony said they could introduce agility and capabilities in that space, and we said let’s see what we can do – and to our great surprise we have made a lot of progress.”

Elbaz said that AT&T has achieved in 18 months progress that would normally take three to five years in a project of this sort Rakuten Symphony’s Site Manager is now deployed as the deployment and construction tool in all AT&T’s markets, and there are now upwards of 7,000 users of the software within its own and contractor construction teams.

“There has been a lot of benefit already in the migration from the old systems to the new system. We’re adding all kinds of digitalisation of our sites, including through drone, and everything is fed up into systems giving access not only to our designers but also to third party vendors. Everybody has access to the same view.”

“We’re very excited about this and are thinking about where else we can extend that capability in other parts where we are doing engineering and build,” Elbaz added.

https://the-mobile-network.com/2024/03/att-uses-rakuten-soft…

[FlankerStan]

Non-GAAP EBITDA and consolidated Non-GAAP operating income have been improvin

Both consolidated Non-GAAP EBITDA and consolidated Non-GAAP operating income have been improving; consolidated Non-GAAP operating income finally turned positive on a monthly basis in December 2023. The Company plans to achieve profitability in FY2024 in terms of consolidated Non-GAAP operating income.

https://www.jcr.co.jp/download/82869f0228ea1354aaf01669e9093…

[FlankerStan]

Bringing AI to the Edge At Scale - The Six Five On the Road

March 11, 2024

On this episode of The Six Five - On the Road, hosts Daniel Newman and Patrick Moorhead welcome Dominique Vanhamme, ED CommSP Segment, Infrastructure Solutions Group at Lenovo and Mehran Hadipour, VP Global Alliances, Rakuten Symphony Inc. (A Rakuten Group Company). Their conversation delves into the future of AI at the edge and how their newly announced solutions are set to revolutionize the adoption and integration of AI in businesses. Their discussion covers: * The synergy between Lenovo and Rakuten Symphony, highlighting the collaboration's objectives and the role of Lenovo's newly announced solutions in advancing AI integration in businesses * Understanding the appeal of Lenovo and Rakuten Symphony for companies seeking AI at the edge solutions, and why they stand out in the marketplace * Insights into customer needs and pain points that inspired the joint solutions by Lenovo and Rakuten, along with the anticipated value these solutions will provide to customers * Predictions around the evolution of the telecommunications sector and Lenovo's strategic position within that transformation.

[FlankerStan]

Best Brand Engagement Campaign – JD Sports & Rakuten Advertising

April 18, 2024

JD Sports & Rakuten Advertising | Leveraging Sneakerhead Community to Boost Authenticity
For over five years, JD Sports and Rakuten Advertising have prioritised affiliate marketing to foster brand awareness and equity. This year, their focus was on engaging sneakerheads authentically, catering to their passion for athletic footwear. Leveraging full-funnel partnership initiatives, they amplified JD Sports' identity and ON Running sub-brand, targeting trend-leading segments like Gen Z and diverse communities.

As a challenger brand in the US market, they differentiated themselves by emphasising inclusivity and authenticity. Collaborating with underrepresented creators and integrating with leading BNPL partners, Rakuten enriched brand experiences and drove significant YoY incremental sales growth. Special events, UGC development, and regional retail activations further strengthened JD Sports’ brand presence and community engagement.

https://hellopartner.com/2024/04/18/uspa-winner-template-cop…

[FlankerStan]

Rating “A –“ from Japan Credit Rating Agency

April 11, 2024

https://www.jcr.co.jp/download/82869f0228ea1354aaf01669e9093…

[FlankerStan]

Announcement Regarding Completion of Purchase and Cancellation of JPY Denominated Senior Bonds

April 25, 2024

Rakuten Group, Inc. (hereinafter the “Company”), as announced on January 25, 2024, in “Announcement Regarding the Issuance of USD Denominated Senior Notes and Purchases of USD Denominated Senior Notes and JPY Denominated Senior Bonds”, has completed the purchase and cancellation of certain of its JPY denominated senior bonds scheduled to mature in and after 2024 (hereinafter the "Purchase"). The details are as follows.


1. Background of the Purchase

The Purchase was conducted with the aim of smoothing out the Company’s bond redemption schedule. The Company used cash on hand and proceeds from the February 2024 issuance of USD denominated senior notes, less the amount used for the February 2024 offers to repurchase USD denominated senior notes due 2024 for cash consideration, as the source of funds for the Purchase.


2. Outline of the Purchase

Target Bonds: Rakuten Group, Inc. 15th Unsecured Bonds (with inter-bond pari passu clause)

Total issue amount: JPY 75 billion

Issue date: December 2, 2021

Maturity date: December 2, 2024

Total face value of the Purchase: JPY 55.8 billion

Remaining amount: JPY 19.2 billion

https://global.rakuten.com/corp/news/press/2024/0425_01.html

[FlankerStan]

Intent and context-aware AI: Rakuten’s plan to deliver smarter telecom outcomes

By Rahul Atri

President, OSS Business Unit Rakuten Symphony

April 19, 2024

Rakuten Symphony’s OSS President Rahul Atri shares his vision for how artificial intelligence can drastically advance the way mobile networks are designed, deployed, operated and monetized - all through a system’s learned ability to understand a user’s intentions. He believes successful AI use is not only a technological challenge, but also one of ROI and sustainability.

Networks of the future will be fully automated and enabled by AI - they won’t need people to figure out things that are manually integrated. In the very near future, network operations teams will collaborate with AI tools to efficiently share their intent and deliver positive business outcomes. This is the next step in the evolution of data – from insight-driven actions to AI-driven actions.

Let’s think about how we solve problems as humans. We define a problem with a view to achieving an outcome - this is our intent. The experience we have acquired over the years in a specific domain is our context, and the outcome is the results we deliver. Let’s translate this to an MNO’s network operations - your AI companion should be able to offer intent and context-aware suggestions that can help to generate successful outcomes.

When Rakuten started investing in AI, it was always a Group-wide initiative, not just within Rakuten Mobile and Rakuten Symphony. All of Rakuten’s 70+ companies are thinking of AI as a service delivery platform. That approach comes from the company’s leadership - that in itself helps to create a DNA of AI use and avoids the bureaucracy it could otherwise bring. To echo the words of Rakuten Group Chief Data Officer Ting Cai, AI needs to be able to take our services to the “next level”.

An AI system needs to understand each individual user and their specific intent with regard to their domain or workstreams - it needs to understand that the user is asking a certain question and the logic behind why they asked it. Everyone, from sales teams, to RAN engineers and even the CEO, has their own specific objectives in terms of what is needed for them to be successful and effective. How can we find a way to make sure all of their varied - and not to mention deeply complex - goals are met?

Here’s how Rakuten Symphony plans to reach that level of sophistication.

Intent and context hold the key

We believe that the user’s intent must be understood by an AI system – as an organization, we are now investing a lot of energy and resources on the classification of intent and contextualization in order to find the most efficient solution to the problem. That’s across a number of scenarios - whether it is an NLP to SQL query, semantic search, triggering a workflow or generating a domain-specific prompt for large language models (LLM).

Every time an individual user speaks to the tool, that tool needs to become more intelligent and grow its understanding about the user and their domain and context. We want the AI to do those things for you so that you can do more meaningful work and do it more efficiently. Rakuten Symphony has already showcased working versions of this at MWC Barcelona 2024 - using live Rakuten Mobile data - and we are progressing rapidly.

AI - tell me how I should operate my network

Almost all types of dashboards and reports are traditionally very static. Whichever tools operators currently use, static dashboards can provide them with a certain level of insight, but that does not necessarily address the specific initial intent of the user that needed the answers.

What needs to happen is for LLMs to speak to your database and platforms in order to become more domain-specific - to drill down into the specifics of what the user needs. It means understanding context-related things such as who is requesting answers - a customer care agent, a radio frequency engineer or an executive. That requires the training of the data - so it knows that a senior executive is asking how well the 5G network is performing compared to the 4G network. The executive doesn’t need data on specific KPIs, just the ARPU on the 5G network compared to the 4G network.

In the near-term, I believe that we will all become AI trainers. Radio engineers will become ‘radio AI engineers’ - they will train AI models with their intent, their context, and they will teach the AI to solve the problem in their own specific way. In the long-term, we will all become domain-independent. We will even be able to exchange neural graphs – our own individual intents, contexts, knowledge and experience - so that we can share whatever knowledge we have acquired over the years.

From RF engineer to CEO – AI in network ops

Let’s look at one example. Today, fine tuning or customizing a radio resource scheduler is a real headache for radio frequency (RF) engineers and requires complex coding and expertise. But what happens if the network scheduler can be tuned via an AI tool and someone can convey their intent to a radio site in a football stadium - where people are constantly uploading Instagram videos - to tune itself for heavy uplink traffic? The scheduler can pre-emptively adapt to this request. You don't have to be an RF engineer to do this.

A simpler example is when a cloud engineer needs to define which 10 things to monitor every day across the network’s operations to know that their cloud is healthy. The AI should be able to decide what those things are and provide relevant and accurate updates on their status. A RAN engineer should be able to say that they can scan their network and see which KPIs are underperforming - and if that’s the case, which action they should take; the tool needs to be intent-aware.

Let’s move on to someone at C-level - the most important day-to-day decision makers in an MNO. They might want to know how much they should invest in 5G infrastructure so that they can achieve a certain level of profit at a certain point in the future. That begs a lot of questions: in which city should they invest in building sites? What benefits and consequences would that decision bring? The AI should be able to tell the CXO that you should only launch, let's say, 1,000 sites and focus on one particular city because 4G sites are 80% loaded there, 80% of users already have a 5G handset, and your competitors already have a distinct advantage with 5G coverage.

The AI might tell the CXO that if they only want to spend a certain amount on infrastructure, and with a specific timeframe in mind, this area probably isn’t the best place to launch 5G. That’s just one aspect. Next, we can ask how the AI thinks the CXO or sales team should price the network’s plans. A tool might tell you that you should launch a monthly 4G plan at $10, for example, with 5G at $12, but for the first six months you should offer it for free so that people can get used to the service.

These are just some examples of how we design the AI platform its capabilities, so that we can not only build technology but solve use cases and measure ROI of the AI.

Rakuten Symphony is committed to end results, delivering the use cases in production and solving the real customer problems. We specialize in turning intent into actions and then into assurance - we always believe that every use case gap is a product or a feature in the making.

https://symphony.rakuten.com/blog/intent-and-context-aware-a…