The less bumpy way to ride e-commerce = Rakuten (Seite 81)

[FlankerStan]

Bullish on Rakuten’s E-commerce and Financial service segments

Bullish on Rakuten’s E-commerce and Financial service segments, which are expected to grow at a double-digit rate

To support its E-commerce business, Rakuten Group established a financial services division to provide mobile payments, credit cards, consumer loans, and other related services. Later on, the financial business spreads to banking, securities, and insurance. Owing to its fast-growing e-commerce business, Rakuten marked a robust result in financial services, with revenue rising by 7.2% YoY to JPY 0.6 trillion and operating profit growing by 10.8% YoY to JPY 98.7 billion.

Over the long term, given a less than 80% coverage ratio for E-commerce in Japan by the end of 2022, we believe Japanese E-commerce could be able to remain a high growth rate in the years ahead and continue to be bullish on Rakuten’s E-commerce and Financial service segments, which are expected to grow at a double-digit rate.

https://www.bondsupermart.com/bsm/article-detail/idea-of-the…

[FlankerStan]

Rakuten is an important owner of Carousell

Carousell says it’s ‘on track’ to profitability, plans to reduce losses this year

PUBLISHED MON, SEP 25 20239:14 PM EDT

KEY POINTS

Secondhand goods marketplace Carousell expects to reduce its losses this year as it capitalizes on the recommerce opportunity.

“We feel confident that we can actually continue to generate healthy growth towards this very meaningful direction of recommerce growth,” co-founder and CEO Quek Siu Rui told CNBC.

The Singapore-based firm was founded in 2012 as an online classified advertisements marketplace where users can list and sell their used goods for money.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/26/carousell-says-on-track-to-p…

[FlankerStan]

Affiliate Insights for Publishers: Preparing for Q4 in ever-shifting e-commerce landscape

October 11, 2023

https://blog.rakutenadvertising.com/marketing-strategies/q4-…

[FlankerStan]

Rakuten Group’s E-commerce business is moving aggressively

For a long time in the past, the pace of development in E-commerce is relatively slow and lagged behind most developed economies due to low acceptability by Japanese consumers. However, E-commerce is rapidly growing in recent years, and the total market size has been ranked third in the world.

Rakuten Group’s E-commerce business is moving aggressively, as total GMV rose from JPY 15.3 trillion in 2018 to JPY 33.8 trillion in 2022, with a compound annual growth rate of 17%. The number of monthly active users also swelled from 10 million to 39 million over the same period. As a consequence, the Group's revenue from the e-commerce business grew by 12.6% year-on-year to JPY 0.8 trillion in 2022, while operating profit surged 36.6% year-on-year to JPY 95.6 billion.

https://www.bondsupermart.com/bsm/article-detail/idea-of-the…

[FlankerStan]

Symcloud Storage advantages – the better storage paradigm

A significant benefit of the software-defined storage provided by Symcloud Storage is in the abstraction it introduces, distancing applications from the underlying infrastructure's complexities. Symcloud Storage unifies application-to-storage lifecycle management and automation.

Historically, interfacing with storage systems involved intricate knowledge of the underlying hardware, network configurations, and vendor-specific protocols. Kubernetes sought to unify this experience by introducing abstractions, such as Persistent Volume (PV) and Persistent Volume Claim (PVC), allowing developers to declare their storage needs without drowning in the minutiae of infrastructure specifics. But the Kubernetes Container Storage Interface (CSI), on its own, provides minimal functionality for stateful applications and volume persistency.

With Symcloud Storage, we go beyond the mere provisioning of storage. Our design philosophy and user experience take into account the holistic lifecycle of applications and their data. Consider scenarios like backup, snapshot, clone, disaster recovery, and data migration, with application-to-storage consistency. In traditional setups, these were often storage-centric operations, disjoined from the application’s lifecycle. There was no application-awareness to the storage.

These abstractions don't dilute the power and flexibility of Symcloud Storage. On the contrary, they empower developers and operators by offering enhanced vanilla Kubernetes features like Storage Classes, which describe and categorize storage types based on various attributes, like storage performance policies, placement policies, resiliency metrics, and backup policies. Applications can thus be paired with storage solutions that precisely match their requirements, in a multi-organizational environment, ensuring optimal performance and cost efficiency.

By leveraging existing Kubernetes constructs like PVs, PVCs and Storage Classes, and combining them with application awareness, environmental awareness and intuitive automation, Symcloud Storage guarantees that applications receive the appropriate storage based on their declared needs, irrespective of the underlying infrastructure or storage backend. This consistent storage experience, from edge to core to the public cloud aids in maintaining the application state, performance, and data resilience across different environments. From development to production and for any lifecycle event, developers and operators can predict how applications will interact with storage, allowing for better performance tuning, troubleshooting, and scaling decisions.

While some Kubernetes solutions enable self-service, they still require a lot of command-line coding and developer expertise. This is also addressed with Symcloud Storage. Anybody can wield its application-to-storage constructs across any number of desired lifecycle outcomes, without being an expert. True self-service is now at your fingertips with no expertise required, delivering application portability, allowing one to migrate across clusters, cloud providers, or even hybrid environments, with full, easy-to-use, automation.
Our approach to storage is a profound departure from traditional paradigms. We are breaking away from the status quo of storage as a detached, static entity and embracing it as an intrinsic, dynamic component of the application ecosystem. Symcloud Storage heralds a new era of cohesive, agile, and efficient application deployment and management. This fusion of application and storage architecture underscores our mission to empower operators and developers by streamlining operations, and ensuring that applications, along with their data, thrive in a harmonious, resilient, and scalable environment.

https://symphony.rakuten.com/blog/symcloud-storage-driving-t…

[FlankerStan]

Why Choose Rakuten for Automation?

Rakuten don't just sell solutions; we use them at scale in our own operations. Experience unmatched efficiency, reliability, and innovation, proven in the most demanding real-world scenarios.

https://symphony.rakuten.com/automation/speed

[FlankerStan]

Rakuten's quarterly internet services revenue 2020-2023

Published by C. Diep, Aug 10, 2023

In the second quarter of 2023, Rakuten Group generated almost 295 billion Japanese yen in revenue via its internet services segment. The segment represents the company's strongest business, carried by its domestic e-commerce operations through the online retail mall Rakuten Ichiba among others.
Rakuten Group, Inc. is a Japanese conglomerate providing e-commerce, FinTech, and telecommunication services.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1404066/rakuten-quarterl…

[FlankerStan]

Rakuten Advertising and Shoplooks

Rakuten Advertising had the opportunity to sit down with Shoplooks Director Susie Zhu to chat through the company’s offering and its exciting plans for the future. Join us as we dive into all things Shoplooks.
Tell us about Shoplooks

Shoplooks is an industry-leading influencer marketing network dedicated to utilizing our influencer database to develop long-lasting partnerships and top-tier campaigns.

Founded in 2017, the company aims to empower the world’s premium creators to be as economically successful as possible. In the initial stages of Shoplooks’ growth, the Asia-Pacific market remained a central strategic focus. Its distinctive Chinese heritage has garnered substantial appeal within the global overseas Chinese consumer base, resulting from rapidly establishing a database featuring high-quality Chinese influencers. Shoplooks achieved significant success in the Asia-Pacific region during its early years with a strategic emphasis on the fashion and luxury sectors.

Over time, Shoplooks’ operations have expanded beyond the Asia-Pacific market, reaching a global audience. We’ve also diversified our collaboration areas to encompass various categories, including lifestyle, food, and pet-related content. In tandem, Shoplooks has refined and expanded its influencer database, cultivating fruitful partnerships with top-notch influencers from around the world.
Now in its 6th year, we have grown to become a three-sided marketplace, serving creators, brands, and shoppers. More than 50,000 retailers employ us for performance-driven campaigns and paid collaboration and invested more than $40 million in influencer marketing through the Shoplooks platform by 2022. Over 250,000 creators and shoppers purchase over $1 billion in products annually through the Shoplooks platform and app.

Affiliate marketing has emerged as a cornerstone of the marketing landscape. In the earlier days, businesses leaned heavily on PR campaigns to boost brand recognition. As the landscape evolved, a more sales-driven approach focused on metrics like clicks and sales to measure performance. This is precisely where affiliate marketing comes into its own. Presently, sales are the central focal point.
We’re excited about how influencer marketing is ascending in significance as an effective strategy to support affiliate marketing and other marketing efforts seamlessly. Over the next 5 to 10 years, it’s projected to soar from a 5% – 10% market share to encompass over 50% of the average marketing budget. Brands are transitioning from conventional social media buying to a content-centric approach, aiming for an integrated brand impact. This syncs perfectly with the foundational philosophy and ongoing innovation path of Shoplooks.

Why did you choose to partner with Rakuten Advertising?
Rakuten Advertising undeniably stands out as a globally renowned and highly professional affiliate network platform. Its extensive network of strategic partnerships with top-tier merchants worldwide and its dedicated focus on the Asian luxury market align seamlessly with Shoplooks’ strategic positioning. From a user perspective, Rakuten’s platform boasts an elegantly designed interface that is both professional and user-friendly. The evident commitment to fostering strong communication between Affiliate Managers (AMs) and Publishers has led to a wealth of high-quality collaboration opportunities with our merchants. Additionally, the platform offers periodic review services, which has proven critical for refining Shoplooks’ influencer marketing strategies.

https://blog.rakutenadvertising.com/marketing-strategies/pub…

[FlankerStan]

Rakuten Advertising and Shoplooks

Rakuten Advertising had the opportunity to sit down with Shoplooks Director Susie Zhu to chat through the company’s offering and its exciting plans for the future. Join us as we dive into all things Shoplooks.

Tell us about Shoplooks

Shoplooks is an industry-leading influencer marketing network dedicated to utilizing our influencer database to develop long-lasting partnerships and top-tier campaigns.

Founded in 2017, the company aims to empower the world’s premium creators to be as economically successful as possible. In the initial stages of Shoplooks’ growth, the Asia-Pacific market remained a central strategic focus. Its distinctive Chinese heritage has garnered substantial appeal within the global overseas Chinese consumer base, resulting from rapidly establishing a database featuring high-quality Chinese influencers. Shoplooks achieved significant success in the Asia-Pacific region during its early years with a strategic emphasis on the fashion and luxury sectors.

Over time, Shoplooks’ operations have expanded beyond the Asia-Pacific market, reaching a global audience. We’ve also diversified our collaboration areas to encompass various categories, including lifestyle, food, and pet-related content. In tandem, Shoplooks has refined and expanded its influencer database, cultivating fruitful partnerships with top-notch influencers from around the world.
Now in its 6th year, we have grown to become a three-sided marketplace, serving creators, brands, and shoppers. More than 50,000 retailers employ us for performance-driven campaigns and paid collaboration and invested more than $40 million in influencer marketing through the Shoplooks platform by 2022. Over 250,000 creators and shoppers purchase over $1 billion in products annually through the Shoplooks platform and app.

Affiliate marketing has emerged as a cornerstone of the marketing landscape. In the earlier days, businesses leaned heavily on PR campaigns to boost brand recognition. As the landscape evolved, a more sales-driven approach focused on metrics like clicks and sales to measure performance. This is precisely where affiliate marketing comes into its own. Presently, sales are the central focal point.
We’re excited about how influencer marketing is ascending in significance as an effective strategy to support affiliate marketing and other marketing efforts seamlessly. Over the next 5 to 10 years, it’s projected to soar from a 5% – 10% market share to encompass over 50% of the average marketing budget. Brands are transitioning from conventional social media buying to a content-centric approach, aiming for an integrated brand impact. This syncs perfectly with the foundational philosophy and ongoing innovation path of Shoplooks.

Why did you choose to partner with Rakuten Advertising?
Rakuten Advertising undeniably stands out as a globally renowned and highly professional affiliate network platform. Its extensive network of strategic partnerships with top-tier merchants worldwide and its dedicated focus on the Asian luxury market align seamlessly with Shoplooks’ strategic positioning. From a user perspective, Rakuten’s platform boasts an elegantly designed interface that is both professional and user-friendly. The evident commitment to fostering strong communication between Affiliate Managers (AMs) and Publishers has led to a wealth of high-quality collaboration opportunities with our merchants. Additionally, the platform offers periodic review services, which has proven critical for refining Shoplooks’ influencer marketing strategies.

https://blog.rakutenadvertising.com/marketing-strategies/pub…

[FlankerStan]

Platinium Band

https://www.soumu.go.jp/menu_news/s-news/01kiban14_02000619.…