Hiroshi Mikitani

I was investment banker at that time. My main responsibility was IT-sector. It was time when internet business was just beginning to develop. It was before Facebook and before Google. Amazon just started and Ebay was founded way before Alibaba. It was an early stage of e-commerce. Though, I haven't obtained any particular background, but I had a very positive sensation about the market.

Definition of e-commerce nowadays is evolving dramatically. When we just started, it was an alternative to "how-to-make-an-order" and became a substitute to day-to-day shopping habits. Nowadays, people do their grocery shopping online, buy clothes. But still, it's only 10-20% of the total retail market. We believe that at some point e-commerce will evolve and hit the ceiling. So, the future of internet shopping will be to combine online and offline shopping.

We have our own blockchain Lab in Ireland and we are looking at possibilities to deploy cryptocurrency solutions in Japan. Surely, blockchain technology is not only about crypto. Mostly it is about providing a new secure way to make safe transactions. If you wish, it is a way to democratize transactions. It will be used in many ways. Not only as cryptocurrency, but for documentation, ledgers… You will see what is going to happen. I still don't know how it can be profitable. Blockchain is going to be used as an important format to provide secure transactions. First thing, we need to separate blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. We, as a company, believe that cryptocurrency is going to be huge but it is not as big yet.Definition of e-commerce nowadays is evolving dramatically. When we just started, it was an alternative to "how-to-make-an-order" and became a substitute to day-to-day shopping habits. Nowadays, people do their grocery shopping online, buy clothes. But still, it's only 10-20% of the total retail market. We believe that at some point e-commerce will evolve and hit the ceiling. So, the future of internet shopping will be to combine online and offline shopping.

By the way, I am super happy that my "Englishization" campaign did well. As the result of it, our business in the USA is growing, Viber has become part of Rakuten Group, we develop video business in Europe. Without Englishization we couldn't have achieved what we have achieved. Over 80% of the engineers we are hiring for Japan office are non-Japanese. So, obviously, they use English to communicate with the Japanese colleagues. The educational campaign gave a broader perspective to all of the employees, and not only of the executive branch, but for the new-comers to Rakuten as well. Now they are benchmarking not only the Japanese, but also global companies. I think the "Englishization" campaign is one of the smartest things I have ever done.

Obviously, Rakuten is growing really fast. Back in 1997 it was only two of us: me and my younger business partner. Now we have over 17 000 employees all over the world. So, from 2 people to 17 000 – It is very rapid growth. Definitely we need to hire many talented people from outside, and we are buying companies to expand our business. We would like to have a special program for training our employees as the future leaders of the organization.

All newcomers to Rakuten whether it's sales or operational department, designers or secretary, - everyone has to learn basics in programming and data science. It is four month-training course. Gradually we will apply this training, because we only started, to every person in the company. I'm sure it will change how people think in general. It is very important.

To give an example, why it's so important to everyone to have basic knowledge how IT works, misunderstanding of the technology is common everywhere. A lot of people, my employees as well, use the term AI, without actual understanding what it is.

It will depend. In some cases, AI will replace people, but in some cases it will enforce human capabilities. These kind of situations happened in the past. I think AI will eventually stimulate economic growth and enrich every segment of society. And there will be a transition what people do, and what AI is capable for. AI has happened, so we should better think of how we use it instead of being afraid.

Main business – is the platform, granting peer-to-peer communication. We also own Rakuten TV, and in Japan, for example, people come to watch content, so we also started to invest into content creation in Europe, US and Japan.

In Japan, we have an exclusive license for NBA streaming. We broadcasting Japanese baseball league. Sport project are in the focus, but we want to make sport content community based: so people watching sports could communicate with each other about each game and results. It is rather media will get messaging options. So wait a little bit.

Rakuten bought Viber in 2014 - 5 years ago. Since then, we are trying to evolve the service from just communication platform to utility platform. We are very happy that Viber is so popular in Ukraine. We plan to expand the online-services. Viber will serve not only as a messenger, so you can communicate with your friends, but also as a utility service for payments, to make content, to transfer money, to make a reservation in a restaurant etc. We plan to evolve Viber from just communication tool to your social tool.

Viber is one of the most secure platforms in the world due to default end-to-end encryption. Some platforms leave a leak for a technical manipulations of security. In Viber it is just impossible technically. So I don`t understand what people are talking about, when they are mentioning that Viber might be insecure.

We already have a subsidiary office Rakuten Engineer in Odessa, about 200 people are working there. We do data analysis. The reason I came to Kyiv this time is to make sure we contribute to the Ukrainian business. We soon set up office in Kyiv.

The use of smartphones and devices become easier. Even old people know how to do it. Security is one of the concerns for such platforms. But I am sure we can use biometric data for this purpose. Many countries, like Estonia, have already implemented digitalization in all branches of government means. Your president Mr. Zelenskiy assured me of a strong commitment to the plan. There are around 97% of Ukrainian smartphone users using Viber already. So, it is definitely going to be a very interesting project for us.

As an investor, I say you definitely have a capacity. From my information, you have a great potential in computer engineering. I think there are around 15 000 graduates in Ukraine. It is a huge IT community. It is a positive sign, that the Government is future-thinking and they may evolve Ukraine to become a great example of digital-country in Eastern Europe.

In IT and internet you need to have different skill-sets. Of the utmost importance are data science, HLS (HTTP Live Streaming), platform architecture. But what we as a company plan to revolutionize is a next generation telecom network. This in what we are investing to right now. Architecture of mobile network is a little bit old and it hasn't changed for the last 20 years. We would like to come up with a new concept for the network platform. This October we launch start of the major new platform in Japan. And plan to deploy this platform later all over the world. Also, in Ukraine.