Rakuten announced it goes for China Market with Baidu

Japan E-commerce shopping mall giant, Rakuten, announced on Jan 27, 2010 that it will invest JPY 4.3B for next 3 years to expand its business in China with founding JV with Baidu.

Rakuten's financial achievements for recent years are relatively good. Its business shows 16.8% growth in 2008, while other legacy traditional departments stores are struggling and having started closing their flagship shops all over Japan.

Rakuten is founded by Hiroshi Mikitani in 1997. Hiroshi Mikitani received the MBA from Harvard Business School , and Bachelor of commerce degree from Hitotsubashi Univ.

(Still, I believe most of Japanese counts which university they graduate from. Hitotsubashi Univ. is one of the top national Universities following Tokyo univ. So, he's elite, anyway.
He started working at Industry Bank of Japan. It is no easy thing to get a job there.)

He mentioned that 1997 was the best and only time period he could start venture business like this, given the meltdown of the stock market due to the end of IT bubbles.

Among those period, many IT venture companies came out. But most of them went bankrupt.
I think Rakuten is the most successful company among the companies came out those days.

Anyway, any of IT companies never had been succeeded to expand its business overseas.

Rakuten itself tried to expand U.S.A in 2007, Thailand in 2008,

Rakuten is very famous to serve not only for the consumers who use their web site, but also for the retail shop owners who open their shops on Rakuten's online mall platform, by elaborating fundamental knowledge about online business, and providing marketing analysis afterwards.

So, Rakuten is more of a service company rather than IT technical companies. They are proud of this saying those servers are their most valued core competence.

I don't know if those service oriented approach works in other overseas markets.
Let's see.

Prosecutor questioned Ichiro Ozawa

Ichiro Ozawa has been a well known politician for decades, and is considered now he is the substantial Prime Minister of Japan.

Last year's historical victory of the Democratic Party of Japan for the election for House of Representatives is considered mostly thanks to the leadership of Ichiro Ozawa.

And the yearly budget for 2010 is considered to be made under strong leadership of Ichiro Ozawa, while incumbent PM Yukio Hatoyama could not show any leadership for the budgeting process.

(In this early January, he visited China being accompanied by "600!!" policy makers, included newly elected lawmakers. That's the evidence how influential he is at the moment.)

So, DPJ is really expecting Ichiro Ozawa's leadership and ability for next year's election for House of Council, so that DPJ can rule the majority of the House of Council, which enables DPJ to pass the laws without help from other parties.

However, he is also well-known as a person who treat the his opponents very badly even if such opponents are in the same party.
Also, he does not like to show up in the media and talk to the citizens directly. From my perspective, his leadership is old type.

If he ended up resigning his position, it will have a great impact for the future of Japan.
Although he is denying all the suspcions posed by inspectors, and many politcians, including cabinet members are supporting Ichiro Ozawa.

The cult of Amatuer

I wanted to know more about Google and some other IT companies to understand why so many IT companies can become so large in very short time.

I picked up the book titled "The cult of Amatuer" written by Andrew Keen.

The title of the Japanese translated version is like "Google, Youtube, Wikipedia, what would thier future be?".

This title does not represent precisely the content of this book . (You know, when it comes to translated books, sometimes those things happen.) But this was an interesting book, because Google and others are growing so rapidly despite of the many critics, which can be seen in this book.

I think those healthy critics give a strength to the U.S IT industries.