1. How Rakuten is planning to run
their entire business in English
Pham Van Thanh - s1180246
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2. 1. Content
• What is the Rakuten
• Why they choose English to business
• How they use English in business
• The benefits of using English
• The challenges
• Why other companies can’t do it
• Conclusion
• Reference
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3. 2. What is the Rakuten
• Rakuten is a Japanese e-commerce company
• Largest e-commerce site in Japan and one of
largest e-commerce site in the world
• Founded in February 1997, founder and CEO is
Hiroshi Mikitani
• Revenues is $4,7 billion and profit is
approximately $866 million in 2011
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4. 3. Why they choose English to business
• Rakuten will choose English as its official
language
• All meetings will be in English, even the menu
of cafeteria is also in English
• The season of choosing English:
– They want to expand their business overseas
– Convenient in transaction with foreign companies
– English is the most popular language in the world
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5. 4. Why they choose English to business
(cont.)
– A lot of foreign people in Japan don’t understand
Japanese
• Improve the communication ability of
employees with foreign people
• Create competitive advantages with other
companies
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6. 5. The benefits of using English
• They can expand their business overseas
• Deploying policies about foreign people easily
• Using English is also a nice way to improve the
communication ability of employees with
foreign people in the context of customers
using English are increasing
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7. 6. The challenges
• Employees will be fired if they can’t speak
English in 2 year
• It make a quite strong pressure for who is
weak in English
• Using English maybe make everyone
understand the content of meeting hardly
• Speaking fluently English in 2 year is not easy
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8. 7. Why other companies can’t do it
• Companies which lack transaction with foreign
companies is not comfortable in English to run
their business
• Companies which have not plan to expand
their business overseas and the English
proficiency of employees is low is also have
not to use English as official language
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9. 8. Conclusion
• It has many challenges to using English in run
business
• If this plan is succeed, it will bring a lot of
chances:
– Expanding the business
– Improve the quality of service
– Make competitive advantages with other
companies
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10. 9.Refrence
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rakuten
• http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn2010071
6f1.html
• http://ajw.asahi.com/article/economy/busines
s/AJ201206300064
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