Hiroshi Mikitani

Hiroshi Mikitani is a Japanese billionaire business magnate and writer. He is the founder and CEO of Rakuten, Inc. He is also the president of Crimson Group, chairman of the football club Vissel Kobe, chairman of Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, and a board member of Lyft. Mikitani was born in 1965 and raised in Kobe, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan. His father Ryōichi Mikitani served as Chairman of the Japan Society Of Monetary Economics and was a professor at Kobe University. 

His mother Setsuko was a graduate of Kobe University and worked for a trading company; she had attended elementary school in New York. He claims descent from Honda Tadakatsu, one of the Four Heavenly Kings of shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu through his paternal grandmother. His grandmother was born to a noble family which had fallen on hard times and raised Mikitani's father as a single mother while running a tobacco store. 

His grandfather was a businessman active in New York and was a co-founder of Minolta. Ryōichi was Japan's first Fulbright Scholar in the US and taught for two years at Yale University; during that time, from 1972 to 1974, the family lived in New Haven, Connecticut. His sister Ikuko is a physician (MD at Osaka University), and his brother Kenichi is a professor of biology at the University of Tokyo.

Mikitani attended Hitotsubashi University, graduating in 1988 with a degree in commerce. Mikitani worked at the Industrial Bank of Japan (now part of Mizuho Corporate Bank) from 1988 to 1996, with a break from 1991 to 1993 to attend Harvard Business School. He left to start his own consulting group called Crimson Group. Mikitani has stated that the destruction caused by the devastating 1995 Kobe earthquake made him realize he wanted to help revitalize Japan’s economy, leading to his resignation from banking and the decision to start his own business.

In 1996, Mikitani began venturing into the high-technology business, looked at various business models, and decided to launch an online shopping mall. On February 7, 1997, Mikitani founded the e-commerce company MDM, Inc. with three co-founders and US$250,000 of their own money, launching the online marketplace Rakuten Ichiba in Japan on May 1, 1997. The company was renamed Rakuten, Inc. in 1999, and Mikitani took it public on the JASDAQ in 2000. 

In founding the company, Mikitani envisioned an online marketplace focusing on the exchange between buyers and sellers as a hybrid between eBay and Amazon.com. It started as a small online marketplace with 13 shops and 6 employees and has since grown into "an e-commerce giant." 

In 2010, Mikitani changed Rakuten's focus, as the company began expanding outside Japan, with acquisitions of overseas e-commerce sites, including Buy.com of the US (now Rakuten.com), PriceMinister of France, and continuing with companies including Canadian e-book service Kobo (now Rakuten Kobo), US cashback site Ebates (now Rakuten Rewards), and Cyprus-based messaging app Viber (now Rakuten Viber), and minority stakes in online scrapbooking site Pinterest and ride-hailing app Lyft (where Mikitani serves as a board member). 

Rakuten has business units including travel, e-books, credit cards, online shopping, banking, and the Rakuten Golden Eagles baseball team. By 2017, Rakuten had over 14,000 employees, over 42,000 shops on its e-commerce sites, and sales of nearly US$6 billion, with over 100 million members in Japan. Beginning in March 2010, Mikitani implemented a plan that he calls "Englishnization", making English the primary language of Rakuten within two years.

While the plan was dismissed as "stupid" by Honda president Takanobu Ito in 2010, Mikitani believes that "English is not an advantage anymore – it is a requirement." He considers the Japanese company's fluency in English, with meetings and reporting done in English, to be a strong advantage for the company globally. In 2011, Mikitani's Englishnization initiative was featured in a Harvard Business Review case study.

Mikitani has been president of Rakuten since its founding, and in 2001 he also became chairman. Among his other titles are Chairman of Rakuten Travel, Chairman of Rakuten Vissel Kobe football club, Director of PriceMinister, Director (Chairman) of Rakuten Kobo, and Chairman, Representative Director, and team owner of Rakuten Baseball. He was named chairman of the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra in 2011.

In 1995, after an earthquake in Kobe caused significant damage so that the city could no longer maintain the Vissel Kobe football club, Mikitani was asked to take over the operations of the team. He purchased the team later that year through his company Crimson Group. In 2014 the team was acquired by Rakuten.

In 2004, the Japanese Pacific League, amidst financial difficulties, dropped two teams, leading to a player strike. Mikitani was approached by league officials about putting together an expansion team in Sendai, which would be named the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles. Mikitani rebuilt, restored, and renovated the Sendai stadium before the team's inaugural season in 2005. The Golden Eagles won the 2013 Japan Series, two years after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that devastated Sendai and the Tōhoku region.