Hiroshi Mikitani

Hiroshi Mikitani is Chairman and CEO of Rakuten, one of the world’s top 3 e-commerce companies by revenue. Unique among Japanese CEO’s, Mikitani has been called a maverick and leader of an emerging, “New Japan.”

As founder, Mikitani created Rakuten’s “Omotenashi” (Japanese service mindset) approach to business, which has empowered over 38,000 merchants of all sizes in a huge online marketplace that offers its 73 million members ecommerce, travel, banking, securities, e-money and more connected to a powerful loyalty program.

Beginning in 2008, Mikitani began to take his unique B2B2C model global. The company now has operations in Europe, the Americas and Asia, counting a presence in 16 countries. In addition to acquisitions last year in Germany, Brasil and the UK, in late 2011, Mikitani made a bold statement by acquiring global eReading company Kobo, which has a family of innovative hardware and one of the largest catalogues in the world.

In March, 2010, Mikitani stunned the Japanese business community by mandating English as the company language. Mikitani and Rakuten are now the subject of an enormously popular Harvard Business School case study on language and globalization taught to all first year students.

Born in Kobe, Japan, Mikitani graduated from Hitotsubashi University in 1988, and earned his MBA from Harvard Business School in 1993. Personal tragedy in the 1995 Great Hanshin earthquake inspired Mikitani to leave a promising career in investment banking to create something meaningful to society. With a small team, Mikitani launched the “Rakuten Ichiba” marketplace in May 1997. Today, Rakuten is listed on the JASDAQ market.