Mixi; Struggling once market dominate SNS company in Japan has changed its CEO

The CEO of the once most popular SNS company in Japan has changed its CEO from Kenji Kasahara (37 years old),the founder and CEO of the Company to Yusuke Asakura (30 years old).

The new CEO's carrer is very unique. He once became a jockey of the horse race, but he quit at the age of 16, and pass the examination of the top of the universities of Japan, Tokyo University and graduated.

He joined the consulting irm, Mckinsey Company Inc. Japan. Then in 2011, he joined the Mixi.

His favorite quotes is from Mark Twain's.

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe horbor. Catch the winds in you sails. Explore, Dream. Discovery."

Asakura puts this quote on his mobile phone's screen, and he makes it a rule to read this quiote time to time. Now, there has been noone who could turn around the Internet Service comapny so far.

While other SNS companies have been trying to become Social Gaming Company, Mixi refused to become heavily relying on the revenue from gaming.

That directions helped Mixi to avoid the blames for the excessive bills to teenage game lovers.
But also, made Mixi to struggle to find new revenue sources.

Asakura admitted in the press conf that it is quite difficult to fight agains FaceBook etc, because of the scale of its businesses.  He expressed that Mixi will put focus on the expansion to asian countries, while they create new applications.

It is quite interesting to see if he could turn around the company.


(Left: ex-CEO and founder; Kenji Kasahara (37)
 Right: new CEO Yusuke Asakura.)

Mr. Son, CEO of SoftBank Telecom, personally donates 10Billion Yen

In addition to the many donations from many countries, many donations are give from foreign countries for this time's Tohoku earthquake.
Japanese people really thank those countries.

And what difference in Japan is that many celebrities expressed their donations for this disater.

Masayoshi Son, CEO of SoftBank and large shareholder of Yahoo Japan, is one of those celebrities. He announced couple of days ago that he would personally donate 10 Billion Yen and 10 million yen each year until he step down the CEO of Softbank telecom.

He is really unique person and his name is well known to eveybody as large comapny's CEO, which is very rare in Japan these days.
Now generally, we don't know who is the CEO of Hitachi, Fujitsu, NEC, Panasonic, Honda etc. Those companies once had a well-known CEO, or sometimes they were founders and took strong leadership. But now such CEO never exists except Son Masayoshi.

He graduated from UCLA in 1980, and founded his company which was a distributer of software. Since then, he built many companies, and most of them became buzz in each time.
However, almost none of them alive at the moment. But funny thing is that he personally could be one of the top executive of large telecom company. He is good at bringing in new ideas and technologies from other countries, mostly from U.S.A. And he really dislike to develop new technology in Japan. Now his company, Softbank made historically good numbers because his company is the only authorised network provider of iPhone, iPad etc. iPhone, iPad can not be connected to other network carriers such as NTTDocomo, KDDI.


He is famous for not investing in developing technologies.

One of the famous anecdotes is that he pushed the project team in Japan back in early 1980's, which aimed to develop personal computer's OS by leveraging a political pressure.

He also became one of strong obstacles for NTT to introduce their unique ADSL standards with insisting to introduce ADSL standard of U.S. His company is famous for not investing in its infrastucture as network carrier. When his company gets in trouble, he usually try to use Japanese Government to push NTT back. Last year, he tried to do that again claiming that Japanese Government should divide NTT again and establish cable optic installation company. But this time KDDI, that once used to be collaborative with SoftBank as to NTT management issue, opposed to SoftBank, because KDDI made their own effort to esbalish their own local fiber network by purchasing CATV companies. KDDI said that they can not be in a same position with the party that didn't make effort by themselves.

But he earned a lot of money and made his dream come true, which was to become large company's CEO.