Rakuten wesentlich besser als Rocket
During 2023, Rakuten will see a drastic decline in its cost base (an improvement estimated at around $110 million per month).
Important Reasons:
Strong reduction of base station construcions costs
Lower roaming costs
MVNO-fee decline through change to MNO
Shop costs: optimazing of shop-stratgy
https://appledoreresearch.com/2023/02/14/rakuten-group-results-fy2022/
Why und how telco networks should transform to cloud
https://prod.ucwe.capgemini.com/wp-content/...ication-of-Networks.pdf
Geoff delves into why 5G revenues have failed to meet expectations, what customers and businesses anticipate from network operators and the potential for operators to capitalize on new monetization opportunities.
https://tecknexus.com/5g-network/5g-build-monetize-what-coming-next/
As an established group of businesses, in everything from advertising to travel, and fintech to fashion, Rakuten has more scope than a conventional telco for creativity in how it acquires, retains, and creates monetizable value from, its customers.
https://appledoreresearch.com/2023/02/14/rakuten-group-results-fy2022/
Rakuten’s Advertising business has bucked the global trend, with 16% growth compared to an international fall in YoY growth rate (around 4.3%).
https://appledoreresearch.com/2023/02/14/rakuten-group-results-fy2022/
Challenge
Rakuten Advertising, a digital advertising division of Rakuten Group, was managing a robust campaign structure across various global marketplaces for its client, TASCHEN, a luxury art book publisher. This led to manual management with a need to streamline and automate as much as possible.
Solution
Rakuten Advertising partnered with Skai, particularly for our advanced optimization, to become more efficient with Amazon Ads campaign management across TASCHEN’s global presence.
The first step was tapping into Skai budget management optimization tools that leverage advanced algorithms and predictive statistical modeling. The team leveraged Portfolio and Budget Navigator across five Amazon marketplaces (US, UK, ES, IT, DE). Rakuten Advertising set up a test of automated optimization rules for TASCHEN’s Amazon Ads campaigns. All active campaigns were grouped within a Portfolio, a collection of campaigns that share the same goal, set with a minimum target ROI of 10. To best manage budgets, the team also incorporated Budget Navigator, optimization management set across Portfolios with the same spend goals, with a goal of maintaining the monthly budget pacing to avoid missing sales opportunities. These two optimization rules gave Rakuten Advertising the flexibility to create customized rules with the exact control to hit TASCHEN’s business goals.
Results
Rakuten Advertising streamlined its optimization workflows while improving performance at scale. After setting up Portfolios and Budget Navigator in the U.S. TASCHEN’s performance increased from one month to the next. They saw an ROI increase of 28% and a revenue increase of 24% while lowering ad costs by 3%. So even though the ad spend decreased the next month, they still saw an increase in performance.
https://skai.io/case-studies/...witter&utm_campaign=OrganicSocial
Rakuten Advertising hires Cyprus Malinao ahead of launching new media products
By Digital News Asia February 3, 2021
Cyprus well versed in programmatic, media & data capabilities
After expanding its affiliate marketing business into Asia in 2017, the company is now gearing up to launch ad inventory in its owned-and-operated media properties: Rakuten Viber and Rakuten Viki.
Malinao will focus on growing the media arm of the business in the Asia-Pacific region.
Owned-and-Operated Media Properties
Rakuten Viki, a global video-on-demand (VOD) platform that streams the latest in Asian entertainment, recorded a reach of over 27 million in more than 190 countries. It is one of the fastest growing platforms, banking more watch time than Netflix per user. Meanwhile, mobile communication application Rakuten Viber has made its mark in the top 10 downloaded apps of all time, with over 1 billion users worldwide.
Rakuten Advertising boasts the largest affiliate publisher network in Asia, including China, Singapore and South Korea, with its Asia-Pacific network recording a year-on-year growth of 48%. The company has also secured exclusive partnerships with premium content and finance publishers.
Its set of global media properties allows brands to be discovered by new audiences, in particular Millennials and Gen-Z. 68% of Rakuten Viki audiences and 70% of Rakuten Viber users are aged between 18-34 years old, providing brands the opportunity to reach this group of passionate and loyal audience.
https://www.digitalnewsasia.com/business/...nching-new-media-products
https://appledoreresearch.com/2023/02/14/rakuten-group-results-fy2022/
by Woody Oh | Feb 22, 2023
We published the Q4 2022 Japan OEM share by operator report, and here are some of the noteworthy changes regarding Rakuten Mobile for the last three years, focusing on Q4 2020, Q4 2021 and Q4 2022.
- Apple : No iPhones in 2020, but keeps growing over the last two years. The share growth of iPhones is estimated to be related to (1) Rakuten's bids to diversify the products line-up, and (2) efforts to grow its ARPU
- Oppo : Showing almost the same pattern as iPhones. We understand that Oppo is one of Rakuten's strategic smartphone partner as this OEM provides high-performing, and price-competitive Android devices. By shipment volume, Oppo was no.1 at Rakuten Mobile during Q4 2022 in Japan.
-Others (mostly Rakuten brand supplied by ODM's) : Opposite trend to Apple and Oppo, showing downturn for the last three years. At first, these affordable devices were largely positioned to rapidly grow Rakuten's subscribers with free data plan, but with Rakuten's strategy change from volume to value, the share by Rakuten-branded smartphones are on the decrease. There is no new Rakuten-branded smartphone launched for a year since Rakuten Hand 5G early last year.
https://www.strategyanalytics.com/...n-mobile-during-q4-2022-in-japan
the strong developement of Rakuten Symphony
and the IPO of Rakuten Bank.
Not to be one upped by PayPay, Rakuten Pay rolled out a generous subsidy program of its own in October 2021, claiming that its services would be “effectively free” for new merchants to use for the next 12 months. Of course, not every merchant who signed up would get the services for free, only SMEs with annual sales of ¥1 billion or less.
The idea was to swiftly onboard more SMEs into the Rakuten digital services ecosystem, which has a loyalty points system that is popular with shoppers. The Japanese e-commerce giant reckons that SMEs can attract more business if they allow consumers to use their Rakuten points.
Rakuten Pay has about 32.5 million users in Japan and almost a 17% share of Japan’s QR code payments.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zennonkapron/2023/02/...?sh=458897ef2209
https://martech360.com/customer-experience/...-with-juniper-networks/
Published February 27, 2023
Read more: https://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/news/...uten-kobo-inc#ixzz7uY1eOqt8
And on the other side, Rakuten Pay is very important for the growth of Rakuten Mobile.
2023/02/24
https://www.rakuten-bank.co.jp/press/2023/230224.html
February 27, 2023
By Anshul Bhatt Head of Symworld Solutions of Rakuten Symphony
Rakuten Symphony has the right foundation to leverage the AI revolution thanks to the last four years of digitalization and relentless automation
Have you seen the latest TIME magazine cover? For the first time in history, the cover features AI. That's right, folks — the AI revolution is here, changing how we live and work.
One of the most exciting applications of AI is in the telecom industry, where tools like ChatGPT are disrupting how we generate and gather valuable insights from the vast amounts of data generated by telecom network operations. However, to fully leverage the benefits of AI, it is essential to go beyond just insights. And that's the goal here at Rakuten Symphony, to go beyond insight generation and question-answer-based discovery toward action orchestration and autonomous networks.
We published our viewpoint on telecom's AI and autonomous networks almost three years ago in the paper, “Towards a Truly Autonomous Network.” With increasing complexity, telecom networks are not only for humans but also for machines. At the same time, the increasing costs to maintain complex modern telecom networks cannot be offloaded to the customers. Moving towards an AI-powered autonomous network is the only way to offer quality services to consumers sustainably.
https://symphony.rakuten.com/blog/...ecom-industry-ready-to-digest-it
Telecom industry's first Network Data Analytics Function (NWDAF) in production
TEL AVIV, Israel, Feb. 28, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- RADCOM Ltd. (Nasdaq: RDCM) announced today that it has partnered with Rakuten Mobile in Japan to deliver closed-loop automation using AI-powered 5G analytics that automatically analyzes the network and takes corrective actions to enhance the customer experience and prevent service degradations, revolutionizing operational workflows and driving towards achieving network autonomy. Our continued collaboration is part of a strong partnership driving operational and assurance innovation to deliver zero-touch, customer-centric network automation.
RADCOM NWDAF will be commercially available to telecom operators worldwide through the Rakuten Symphony Symworld marketplace. The innovative solution addresses the challenges of monitoring complex 5G networks and complies with Releases 16 and 17. It also offers additional use cases, such as RAN optimization. It integrates advanced AI/ML-based analytics and automates telco-specific workflows while providing a range of use cases, from simple and complex tasks to supporting zero-touch autonomous intent-based networking.
Driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), RADCOM's 5G Network Data Analytics Function (RADCOM NWDAF) enables Rakuten Mobile to automatically detect and prevent degradations in the customer experience for multiple use cases such as mitigating signaling storms, proactive O-RAN optimizations, and preemptive network traffic load optimization.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/...radcom-partner-drive-070000375.html
February 27, 2023
At MWC Barcelona, Rakuten Symphony has big plans for the launch of Symware 2.0 server. These activities will get an assist from Silicon Valley – where Intel Network Builders will draw attention to the breakthrough new product by publishing a guest blog post from Rakuten.
Symware platform is a revolution in how mobile networks are built with the entire product optimized for distributed unit (DU) applications - from CPU to industrial design.
Two Symware 2.0 models – for indoor and outdoor deployments – were announced at the show. Both models feature extensive automation capabilities that enable remote zero touch provisioning and life cycle management minimizing human installation and updating time and reducing total cost of ownership for MNOs.
Intel Technology for Performance, Reduced Power
In the guest Intel post, author Sushil Rawat, VP, RAN Product Platform at Rakuten Mobile Inc., provides an overview of the Symware 2.0 platform and also discusses its incorporation of Intel technology. The products are powered by a 4 Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor with built-in vRAN Boost, an on-chip accelerator that boosts Open RAN performance without the extra power and board space needed for a discrete accelerator.
Rawat also writes about how the use of the vRAN Boost and the improved performance of the processor cores reduce power consumption per sector by 50%. It’s a great story of two technology innovators coming together to develop a server with COTS components that makes true the promise of Open RAN.
https://symphony.rakuten.com/blog/...er-launch-gets-assist-from-intel
By David Soldani February 27, 2023
The extended version of the Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) is a technology for instrumenting the behavior of a Linux kernel (and now MS Windows) without invasive modifications. Especially, its dynamic programmability and reliability make it a powerful tool for cloud-native observability, security and networking. eBPF is to Linux kernel (and now Windows) as Java-script is to Web browser. eBPF enables programs to run in the kernel of the host operating system and to instrument the kernel without changing the kernel source code. This revolutionary technology allows us to program the kernel safely and dynamically without rebooting or crashing the machine.
According to Gartner, by 2025, over 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms, up from 30% in 2021. Simultaneously, Kubernetes is becoming the de facto standard for cross-cloud orchestration and a pillar of cloud-native architectures.
The cloud-native architecture is one of the key drivers of eBPF based applications, also because more kernel subsystems become extensible using eBPF, drivers and soon kernel modules could be written in eBPF. And, according to Groundcover, 2023 is going to be the year of eBPF when it comes to monitoring. For the reasons presented above, we will see more and more observability and security solutions based on eBPF. Legacy vendors, alongside many new emerging players, will heavily rely on eBPF as part of their stack, offering customers new alternative solutions to observability.
Today, I am pleased to announce our white paper on “eBPF for Telco”, where we introduce what eBPF is and its potential for Telco cloud. We review some of the most promising use cases, pricing and billing models applied to the utilization of this revolutionary technology and discuss the eBPF technical feasibility and business availability for current (5G) and future mobile communication networks (6G and beyond).
We hope this White Paper helps you understand what you can do with eBPF in telecom and we look forward to any industry opportunities to collaborate.
https://symphony.rakuten.com/blog/introducing-rakuten-telecom-ebpf
As we have highlighted before, Rakuten draws attention to its cost advantage for heavy data users. A network that scales allows Rakuten to positively encourage data-hungry subscribers onto its network. And better-connected subscribers are better connected to everything else.
The average Rakuten users uses 18.4GB/month, more than twice the average for users of other networks.
ARPU is also steadily increasing at around $19/month.
https://appledoreresearch.com/2023/02/14/rakuten-group-results-fy2022/
Rakuten helps shoppers earn cash back
Rakuten is a popular mobile app and browser extension that makes it easy to earn cash back rewards when you shop. It's free to join the program. When you see an available offer, you can activate it and then make an eligible purchase with the retailer to earn cash back rewards. If you don't yet use programs like this, you're missing out on free cash when you shop.
Rakuten partners with over 3,500 stores, so there are many opportunities to earn cash back. When you have at least $5 in your account, you'll be eligible to receive your earnings on the next payment date. Rakuten sends out payments every three months.
How I earned $93 last year
I do a lot of online shopping because it's convenient. Last year, I put more effort into using Rakuten to earn rewards. I made $93 by activating offers and shopping like normal. Since there are so many participating retailers, many of my purchases qualified for cash back earnings.
However, since you must activate an offer before shopping, I didn't always remember to use Rakuten before checking out with my favorite retailers. If I had used the program more frequently, I could have made over $100 last year. My goal is to use Rakuten more this year.
This is my strategy from now on
Since I shop online often, I want to maximize my rewards. I did one simple thing at the beginning of the year that I hope will help boost my earnings. I wrote a reminder on a brightly colored sticky note and placed it on my desktop monitor. I hope this will help remind me to check for available cash back offers before placing an online order.
Most programs, like Rakuten, won't award you cash back unless you activate an offer before shopping. That means you need to go out of your way to activate offers. If you're forgetful like me, you may want to put a sticky note reminder on or near your computer so you don't forget.
https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/personal-finance/..._campaign=article