Rakuten’s acquisition of Tradoria counted as one of the strangest takeovers of 2011. We weren’t the only ones who asked ourselves, “What were they thinking?”
Meanwhile Rakuten’s CEO Hiroshi Mikitani has quite plausibly laid out his plans for how Tradoria (now Rakuten Deutschland) can overtake Amazon.de in the next 5 years.
In a DLD interview, he again emphasized what interested him in Tradoria in particular:
"We liked Tradoria, although it is not so big at this moment. I started from two people without raising any money. So I believe they have a very good platform, a very good culture, and the business model is very similar to Rakuten.
So more than the big companies we acquired like Play.com, Priceminister or Buy.com I think Tradoria (Rakuten Germany) has a more natural fit with us.
And we know how to grow this model very rapidly. We have done it. We started from 0, now it is 14 billion USD a year, and it keeps growing."
Hiroshi Mikitani is betting on big opportunities with the long tail – on small and medium sized retailers with very special and unique products (“non-barcode items”), from which Etsy and similar marketplace sites are also surviving.
The DLD team has summarized the session with Hiroshi Mikitani ("The Secrets of a Huge Success").
It wasn’t only Tradoria who found an international partner in 2011. Yatego raised growth financing from Acton Capital Partners (German link) and Hitmeister raised capital from Tiger Global (German link).
All DLD sessions are available now as video or as text summaries online.
Related posts:
- How Rakuten wants to overtake Amazon.de with Tradoria
- Rakuten’s Global Expansion Continues, Tradoria Rebranding
- Rakuten: Japanese E-commerce Giant Continues Expansion with Play.com of the UK
- Rakuten/Buy.com Using Tradoria To Spearhead Into Germany
- Rakuten On Their Expansion Plans with Buy.com and Priceminister
- Buy.com Goes for $250 Million to Rakuten
Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.
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