Rakuten Group Inc S/Adr

Good afternoon and thank you for joining Rakuten's 2024 Third Quarter Financial Result Meeting. We have disclosed the latest consolidated financial report at 3.30 p.m. today. You can view this data on our corporate website page for investors along with the presentation documents used in this meeting. If your audio or video is interrupted, you can use another streaming server from the button below the video. Mr. Megitani will begin the presentation. Good afternoon, everyone. So let me begin this presentation. Lockdown Group 2024 third quarter consolidated financial result announcement. So this is the agenda for today. We are going to explain the overall group strategy and the third quarter highlights and segment-based result and CFO will explain and Chief AI Officer Tim Chai will also make a presentation. And first about the group strategy.

So this time, we will talk about the current status, but we also would like to talk about the future strategy just a little bit. So what you are very much concerned about, the Rakuten mobile situation. Right now, the total number of mobile subscribers is 8.12 million lines, so it's growing steadily. an MNO, capital investment. After we have had the full-fledged investment, we have, for the first time, a quarterly profit. For Nongap operating income, 12.3 billion Japanese yen in profit, and IFARS operating income, 538 million in profit, and also achieved a quarterly self-funding Let me explain what this is. Rakuten Group companies, there are multiple businesses in this group. We have different FinTech companies. We receive dividends as well as management fees, and also other subsidiaries having cash. We do the cash management. investment is made, and also from the banks and capital markets, we have no loans coming from the financial market, meaning we are sustaining ourselves financially ourselves. So that is a major contribution to sound financial situation of our group, and Rakuten Mobile as well. We have good visibility as to the future vision, and therefore Rakuten Mobile Leveraging the cost advantage, we would like to grow this business, Rakuten Mobile, and also derived from that, there is various kinds of data that we collect. I think we are one of the rare entities that have rich data that we have in our hands, and more than 100 million members domestically, and also more than 1 billion overall in the entire globe. And we have such membership, and we would like to have this growth. We have made English our official language.

And we are able to grow towards the international market. And the sourcing weighted average cost The WACC and high growth and high returns should be monitored carefully for our future growth. For your information, Lockdown Mobile, this is our internal comparison against the globally successful use case. First, about within the Rakuten group, we saw the Rakuten cards grows rapidly, which is about 30 million customers. at this moment, and initial phase of this Rakuten card, if we compare the speed of the subscription, the Rakuten Mobile is 1.7 times faster than the Rakuten card. And when we compare the speed of the increase against the T-Mobile, which is a global big player, they had introduced a program called Un-Carrier, and they started to grow very rapidly and their growth speed We had adjusted against the population level, but we are even faster than the T-Mobile growth rate. They had four competitors, and with the un-carrier concept, they were able to refresh this dominated telecommunications market in the States. So within the carrier, they have the largest market cap at this moment. So we would like to aim to be like them.