Hiroshi Mikitani was born on March 11,1965 and is a Japanese billionaire business magnate and writer.
28 Facts About Hiroshi Mikitani
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Hiroshi Mikitani is the founder and CEO of Rakuten, Inc Hiroshi Mikitani is the president of Crimson Group, chairman of the football club Vissel Kobe, chairman of Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, and a board member of Lyft.
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Hiroshi Mikitani's father Ryoichi Mikitani served as Chairman of Japan Society Of Monetary Economics and was a professor at Kobe University.
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Hiroshi Mikitani's mother Setsuko was a graduate of Kobe University and worked for a trading company; she had attended elementary school in New York.
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Hiroshi Mikitani's grandmother was born to a noble family which had fallen on hard times, and raised Mikitani's father as a single mother while running a tobacco store.
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Hiroshi Mikitani's grandfather was a businessman active in New York, and was a co-founder of Minolta.
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Hiroshi Mikitani's sister Ikuko is a physician, and his brother Kenichi is a professor of biology at the University of Tokyo.
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Hiroshi Mikitani attended Hitotsubashi University, graduating in 1988 with a degree in commerce.
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Hiroshi Mikitani worked at the Industrial Bank of Japan from 1988 to 1996, with a break from 1991 to 1993 to attend Harvard Business School.
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Hiroshi Mikitani left to start his own consulting group, called Crimson Group.
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Hiroshi Mikitani has stated that the destruction caused by the devastating 1995 Kobe earthquake made him realize he wanted to help revitalize Japan's economy, leading to his resignation from banking and decision to start his own business.
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In 1996, Hiroshi Mikitani began venturing into the high technology business and started looking at various business models, and decided to launch an online shopping mall.
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On February 7,1997, Hiroshi Mikitani founded the e-commerce company MDM, Inc with three co-founders and US$250,000 of their own money, launching the online marketplace Rakuten Ichiba in Japan on May 1,1997.
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Hiroshi Mikitani was renamed Rakuten, Inc in 1999, and Mikitani took it public on the JASDAQ in 2000.
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In founding the company, Hiroshi Mikitani envisioned an online marketplace focusing on the exchange between buyers and sellers, as a hybrid between eBay and Amazon.
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In 2010, Hiroshi Mikitani changed Rakuten's focus, as the company began expanding outside Japan, with acquisitions of overseas e-commerce sites including Buy.
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Hiroshi Mikitani has been president of Rakuten since its founding, and in 2001 he became chairman.
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Hiroshi Mikitani was named chairman of the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra in 2011.
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In 1995, after an earthquake in Kobe caused significant damage so that the city could no longer maintain the Vissel Kobe football club, Hiroshi Mikitani was asked to take over operations of the team.
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Hiroshi Mikitani purchased the team later that year through his company Crimson Group.
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Hiroshi Mikitani was approached by league officials about putting together an expansion team in Sendai, which would be named the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles.
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Hiroshi Mikitani rebuilt, restored and renovated the stadium in Sendai, prior to the team's inaugural season in 2005.
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In 2017, Hiroshi Mikitani partnered with his friend FC Barcelona player Gerard Pique to co-found Kosmos Holding.
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Hiroshi Mikitani had joined Keidanren, the Japanese business federation in 2004.
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In 2012, Hiroshi Mikitani was awarded the Harvard Business School Alumni Achievement Award, one of the school's highest honors.
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Hiroshi Mikitani was named to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Industrial Competitiveness Council.
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In 2014, Hiroshi Mikitani was awarded the rank of Chevalier of the National Order of the Legion of Honour by the French government.
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In 2017, Hiroshi Mikitani was awarded the Order of Merit of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.