Rakuten Group, Inc. (RKUNY) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Rakuten Group, Inc. (OTCPK:RKUNY) Q1 2023 Earnings Conference Call May 12, 2023 2:15 AM ET

Company Participants

Hiroshi Mikitani – Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer

Tareq Amin – Group Executive Vice President

Conference Call Participants

Operator

[Foreign Language]

[Interpreted] Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for making yourselves available today. We now would like to start the Rakuten 2023 First Quarter Financial Results Meeting. We have disclosed the latest consolidated financial reports at 3:00 p.m. today. You can view this data on our corporate website page for investors, along with the presentation documents using this meeting.

So Mr. Mikitani will give the presentation. Miki, please.

Hiroshi Mikitani

[Foreign Language]

[Interpreted] Thank you very much. So this is streaming and you are watching me via video in FY 2023 first quarter consolidated financial results briefing session will be started. And first of all, summary. And the first one is Internet Services, and it’s performing pretty well. And other companies are struggling to some extent.

But the first of all, the Rakuten Mobile contributed to lifting Ichiba GMS and also the Ichiba performance pretty well standalone and FinTech and Rakuten Bank and Rakuten Securities comparing to the year before, revenue went up by 7.6% and OI plus 20.4%. As you know, on April 21st, and the Rakuten Bank listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Prime Market.

As for the Mobile, and I will elaborate this later, continues the loss improvement is made and the revenue is improving and we are achieving improvement here. And then this morning, Rakuten Mobile held a press conference and we made some announcement there, a new roaming contract.

With that, we will be able to enhance the customer experience and also it will contribute to control our cost to a large extent. And first of all, Rakuten Group consolidated EBITDA continuous improvement and then the consolidated revenue compared to the year before plus 9.3%, which is JPY475.6 billion. And also the consolidated EBITDA was JPY7.4 billion and made a further improvement here.

So the major KPIs. So Global GTV, plus 23.3% Y-o-Y, which is JPY9.1 trillion and domestic EC GMS performing pretty well at JPY1.4 trillion plus 12.2% increase Y-o-Y and then consolidated revenue plus 9.3% Y-o-Y and non-GAAP OI made improvement by JPY30.2 billion comparing to the year before.

And the Rakuten Card Shopping GTV reached JPY4.9 trillion. And comparing to the year before, it went up by 22.2% and Rakuten Card issued we are almost reaching to JPY30 million. And the Rakuten Securities General Accounts as of today, it already went beyond JPY9 million and then Rakuten Bank Accounts, which is JPY13.74 million.

So this is the overall business portfolio of Rakuten. This is the structure and the other bank insurance securities, payment, Internet service and also Rakuten Rewards and other international business and mobile. So in each industry, we have established our leading position. And then — so the plus 10.3% of the MAU, we have increased the MAU, which is over JPY40 million.

And then the ratio of users of two or more services is 76.1%. This illustrates how strong our ecosystem is among that. One of the key point is the Rakuten Super Point, Rakuten Point. So in the last 12 months, it reached about JPY640 billion and SPU went up by 20%. So our ecosystems power is getting stronger and stronger.

So in the previous briefing session, membership value formula was disclosed from the previous financial results briefing. So as of the end of Q1 ’23, JPY8.6 trillion, which is plus 22.7% Y-o-Y basis. So the membership value is increasing.

So let’s look at the different segments. Starting with the Mobile segment. Mobile business year-on-year plus up JPY26.2 billion. And for revenue, JPY57.9 billion. And so 25.3% year-on-year for the — and so we are and — more segment overall, JPY96.3 billion. So it’s getting better. And this is looking at the revenue and operating income and EBITDA of Mobile segment. EBITDA, this is after adjustment, so minus JPY50 billion. So we have peaked out and that means improvement is on track. And as for Rakuten Mobile.

In the morning today, the Rakuten Mobile held a press conference, and so there are some overlaps in my presentation, but bear with me, please. Rakuten Mobile, we’re trying to aspire to be the number one carrier in Japan. So we would like to lower the high price of mobile communication services, so that we can have the consumers of Japan efficiently and effectively use their money. That was the key point and we have been trying to do that. And so we’re going to become number one in the future, but towards that we have to leverage our ecosystem, the Rakuten Ecosystem as well as the latest network technology so as to have this cost structure advantage leveraged fully.

Later, when we talk about Symphony, Tareq Amin will give more details. But fully virtualized technology is used to have a major gap in cost and also including automation, automation will push further down the cost. That is what we’re striving to do. But having said that, of course, for what reasons, do people choose their carriers for mobile services. More than half of the people said, price is important. And quality of the network comes as the second significant reason.

Of course, we have one price to offer at Rakuten and so 39.4% of the survey said Rakuten Mobile is number one. But we ranked the sixth in terms of network quality. So once we can improve on that quality aspect, then we can have increase in ARPU as well as the number of subscribers.

And also, one of the reasons for — or the key reason for churn of Rakuten Mobile is the quality of the network. So we want to make improvements on that. But having said that, in the past three years or four years. So we have been opening up base station in a rapid pace. As of April end 4G, 57,378 went on air. So this is unprecedented pace of opening up the base station and the population coverage is 98.4%. But we still have some barriers to overcome. That was how we feel in the customer’s voice.

So Rakuten uses flat rate JPY2,980 through unlimited data usage that is great, and we can use point to pay the fee. So the customer satisfaction level is increasing. Having said that, but the indoor and the busy area and the subway, so the coverage in those area needs to be improved. That is a lot of voice from the customers. So initial target, we want to make this in one year. However, not like that, we should do that immediately. And as announced earlier, and I’m sure you already know this, partnership with KDDI, we strengthened the partnership with them, and then we increased the population coverage up to 99.9% immediately.

And then the — in the Rakuten on area, we had unlimited usage of data. But through this, we have the SAIKYO Plan, the most popular plan. So we can increase this up to 99.9%, including the partnership partner network. On top of that — and then in the Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka, we will be leveraging Platinum Band.

With that, the indoor busy area and the subway, the connectivity can be possible. Looking at the map or the region, I think this is easier to understand. The left side is 98.4% area. And this area is based on Rakuten’s own network and the orange area is a partner’s network. But basically from June 1st and onward this will be — color will be changed everything into things. So the Rakuten, the mobile, the coverage will become the industry highest standard.

And today we have announced this — under SAIKYO plan. This is evolution from the UN-LIMIT VII, and this was what we announced this morning. So repeatedly saying, in the partner area, if it goes beyond 5 gigabyte and then it will slow down to 1 mega bps. And then you have to charge JPY600.

So we will eliminate or abolish that kind of limitation with this new plan and the coverage improves and the price is same. Therefore, so the high-speed data communication in overseas market or the phone call in the overseas from Japan to overseas or overseas to Japan, it will become free. And also domestic call, it will become free based on the link communication and the link desktop to be launched in August 1st.

And then as for the sign-up, so Internet, 40 million people visit the site every day, so they come to our site and then the one click is needed to open up the new sign up. And then the — moving out from the other carrier would be done with one click. I think this is a quite compelling offering.

And then repeatedly saying, so nationwide unlimited use of high-speed communication, data communication is available with the same price today. So if you use up to 3 gigabyte, it is JPY980 up to 20 gigabyte is JPY1,980. So this is a quite attractive price. And as for the network area, we have more area with unlimited data usage, repeatedly saying subway and busy area and skyscraper indoor of the height of building, and we will strengthen the partnership in those areas.

With that — so in Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka area, I think the connectivity would be improved. And then the handover from the partner network. So Rakuten to KDDI handover, there was no problem. But coming back from their network to ours, there were some latency or lag. But because of the change of the software configuration, it will become seamless. So the Rakuten SAIKYO plan is the plan that I wanted to explain and we will start the service from June 1st.

So this is it — as for the cost. So the most frequently asked question what will be the cost of this new roaming. And first of all, cash out portion, over the past three years ’23, ’24, ’25. In ’23, well, already four months has passed. So more than JPY100 billion reduction into next year and the two years after about JPY300 billion. CapEx reduction is planned.

Next, looking at the cost side. So what about the details of the roaming? Because we are under NDA, I am not able to explain in detail. But the JPY15 billion per month, cost reduction is our target and this hasn’t changed at all. And the new roaming contract would contribute to our financial health. And this is the structure and I would like you to understand in such a way. So KDDI roaming area will become the unlimited. And then this new or renewed roaming contracts support that.

And then on top of that — so depending on the application conditions. I believe that the 700 megahertz and 800 megahertz, 900 megahertz in the future. This the platinum bond is something we would like to acquire. And for 700 megahertz and allocation request is already made public. So this is the time line — it’s up to the processes that we need to go through. But as for the allocation, probably after autumn.

As for user acquisition, until now in the Rakuten Group, unlike other companies, there have been a lot of applications amongst the heavy Internet users. We have been focusing our attention in that segment. However, having said that, switchover or churn from other carriers or vice versa had to go through a very cumbersome process, but we want to promote this one-stop process. In other words, no need for cancellation process anymore.

And another is something that was announced today. This is a one-click activation. eSIM will be the primary method being used in the future. And I think most of the people are already using mobile phones and eSIM can be used. And in our Rakuten Group, a lot of people are actually going through the authentication identification confirmation process using eSIM. And therefore, for data, without know your customer process, one-click activation will be necessary and that’s it. And the voice SIM, the normal SIM, for that as well as soon as possible, we would like to introduce this one-click activation method as well.

To be more specific, this process is explained quite well in the video, which I would like to run now.

[Video Presentation]

So you can see that this is really epoch-making. On the website of Rakuten Group. If you just log in a user name or password, don’t have to be input credit card. Once it is registered already, then one click activation is possible. And therefore, the number of subscribers can really increase dramatically as a result, we’re hoping. And right now, the rate of churn has been coming down dramatically as well. And so I think we are on par with the other carriers in this market for those that have been with us for one year.

And with the SAIKYO plan that was announced today, we would like to reduce this churn rate more dramatically and so that we will be having lower churn rate than the market average. And also synergistic effect is being felt in a major fashion as well. Rakuten Mobile is getting referrals from the ecosystem, one click activation that I just explained, will really further push this in this direction. And then conversely, Rakuten Mobile users will strength the Rakuten Ecosystem. And so we’re already seeing that happening. So acquisition of customers, among others, is being promoted in such a fashion.

Now for your reference, the different services by the different carriers and have certain ecosystems. The net promoting score is being used for comparison. Rakuten Group compared to others is by 20 points or more higher than the other competitors. So we would like to leverage this ecosystem so that we can use further — increase further the number of subscribers. So 40 million monthly active users and so we would like to increase that further to 30%, 40% against the current level of 10% so that we can increase our profits and profitability.

ARPU as well overall, so JPY2,552 for the group overall, JPY2,652. So once we have more data usage, this number, ARPU is expected to go further upward. And by utilizing various services, ARPUs will go up. But the first step for us that we should focus on is the increase of the number of subscribers and data 20 gigabyte on average, which is more than double the other carriers’ data usage. So it is growing very steadily.

And in addition, I am not going into details, but corporate customers. The corporate contracts or corporate mobile contracts is one area where Rakuten Group, we have 900,000 such partners, and we are trying to have this 25% market share and we are on track towards that goal. And in addition, advertisements within Rakuten Link and also optical fiber communications being leveraged for Rakuten Hikari. What was that exact name? I hope I’m okay. So this is Rakuten Hikari connected by flats, which is fiber-to-home, which is on track as well and growing.

And Rakuten Symphony presentation will be made by Tareq Amin, who is the CEO of Rakuten Symphony.

Tareq Amin

[Foreign Language]

[Interpreted] Good afternoon. Today, I’m delighted to share with you the financial results of Rakuten Symphony. What makes Rakuten Symphony unique, it’s an approach to how we enable connectivity. It is one of the few companies in the world that have a software-centric platform for connectivity. We are organized against five business unit segments. Starting from the cloud. This is the world’s largest edge cloud platform. Radio access network, we are the leader, innovator and open run and the pioneers in this technology, thanks to all the efforts that we have done in Japan through Rakuten Mobile.

OSS, we are leading this segment through automation, ruthless efficiency that will deliver productivity and autonomy network and BSS and Internet services. So I will go through these segments just to give you key highlights of what we have achieved in Q1 ’23.

On our cloud business unit, this is really exciting for us. We look at the cloud as an enablement layer to offer massive disruption on offering elasticity, capacity, reliability and security. Symcloud offers one of the largest edge cloud platform in the world consisting of our cloud platform to enable virtualization, containerization, storage platform, orchestration. And one of the key highlights for us in Q1 is really enabling through a large partnership with a global technology firm, our reselling agreement of our Symcloud storage. This will enable us to resell our storage on-prem to offer stateless edge use cases for both retail and telco segment.

Our value proposition is enable customers to modernize on-prem and edge infrastructure. And the business model for this really meets what Symphony is all about, a committed annual revenue of return, a flexible pay-as-you-use billing and a scalable as-a-service revenue model for our cloud business unit.

On radio, an Open RAN very specifically. We have been tirelessly working and leading this industry, looking at opportunities to constantly deliver on quality, reliability and scalability for Open RAN technology. We are very well positioned to lead an impeding industry transformation for further progress and achievements in Q1 ’23.

One of the key highlights to share with you is our — we have signed our first private 5G network through an Axiata signed contract. This enables us to really work with Axiata Group and offering private 5G infrastructure across six Asian countries. Second is our Open RAN network agreement with Salam Telecom.

It offers an opportunity for us to go into Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf countries. And the next-generation telco network through an MOU that we have done with Zain. And another really noteworthy mention is the highlight that we have done by opening our O-RAN Customer Experience Center in the UK for telecom operators to help enable IoT and integration for Open RAN. We’re very, very excited about the progress that we are doing on the radio axis and a lot more to be done, hopefully, in the coming quarters.

And one of the key things I also want to touch base on is what we have been doing, not only in greenfield opportunities for Open RAN, but it is really vital. And our Rakuten Symphony team and our radio engineering R&D team is best-in-class, working on closing the RAN feature parity gaps and brownfield.

We have been tirelessly working on this. And I could tell you today by Q2, we will hit them a very big inflection point for us, where we will be at feature parity with all legacy software features that exist in brownfield operators. This is really, really very exciting. And this is what we’ve been focused on over the last one year to enable brownfield deployment in commercial environment.

On our OSS segment, this is really a very exciting and I think this is one of the key differentiation for Rakuten Symphony. This is really the AI that will drive the productivity, the autonomy that we’re looking on how you run and manage network the relentless productivity that we are driving. And thanks to all of the trials and validation in Rakuten Mobile, we have taken best-in-class of this software of how to run, manage, build, engineer and operate network and deploy it worldwide.

Today, our OSS has over 100,000 registered platform users. We are deployed in 11 global customers and a very healthy pipeline of north of US$3 billion relating just to the segment alone and a very comprehensive product portfolio on this OSS/BSS of over 17 products. A noteworthy mention just to give you a use case and a study for this is a partnership that we have done with a global OEM, where Rakuten Symphony replace an array of legacy solutions and is helping and aiding orchestration of global site deployment and rollout across multiple geographies, multiple countries, approximately three million sites deployed using Rakuten Symphony platform, 100 plus countries covered 11,000 monthly active users. We’re really, really excited about this segment and what it could potentially lead to, especially around autonomy and networks.

Our Internet and Services team has also been leading in disruption and innovation for OTT application. One of the key highlights to mention here is our recent announcement of Communication Platform as a Service. This is an extremely healthy segment. We have launched in Japan, only two products today, our A2P messaging and our chat messaging is already launched with significant amount of revenue growth in less than two months and Rakuten Drive already launched globally for commercial deployment.

And financial results. We are now hitting US$76 million in Q1 ’23. This represents 14.6% year-over-year growth. We are tracking against our target and our budgeted goals, project delivery being well underway. We continue to grow with anchor customers, and we are accelerating new account with healthy pipeline conversion.

And then finally, the Rakuten Symphony growth plan is always started with inception. This is what Rakuten Mobile is all about. Rakuten Mobile has enabled Rakuten Symphony to become what it is today. The trials and validation in Japan and to get the quality, reliability and the scalability have enabled Rakuten to lead especially Open RAN across the world.

This is the inception stage, and we are past this stage. We are now looking at profitability stage in fiscal year ’23, ’24. We want to be flawless about our execution for our anchor global account, look at commercial O-RAN deployment and brand field. This is vital and accelerate our traction and our leadership in both OSS and cloud and this will lead significant improvement in operational efficiency for our future customers.

And as we look at the last stage, it is all about revenue growth as we look at Rakuten being a world leader as a pioneer, a partner of choice, especially for O-RAN deployment and OSS. And with this, thank you very much, and I will conclude my presentation Rakuten Symphony.

Hiroshi Mikitani

[Foreign Language]

[Interpreted] So that was the Symphony part. Next, we would like to move on to the Internet service segment and FinTech segment. Now this time, there are two things. Rakuten Mobile, SPU cost in full amount used to be born, but now it is transferred to Rakuten Ichiba. So that’s one thing. And also the content business that were included have also been transferred.

Basically, the domestic e-commerce GMS highlights, 12.2% increase, JPY1,415 billion, while other competitors are struggling. And so you can see that we are having a very steady growth year. So JPY1,415 billion.

And revenue. So this is a 12.1% increase, which is JPY205 billion almost. And without SPU cost transfer, it would have been a growth of 12.5%. So this difference in the recognition this transfer has a major impact. From the perspective of the analysts, Rakuten Mobile has been contributing to the ecosystem profits. And don’t you consider that in terms of profit and loss, that has been raised many, many times in the past. And therefore, for the SPU cost, there has been this transfer being made Mobile to Ichiba.

And this is showing the major KPIs especially the number of purchasers compared to pre-COVID days, about a 30% increase is seeing and has not come down from that level. In overseas market, they had a spike and then the purchasers dropped in number. However, 16.6% purchase amount per user is the increase. In other words, in terms of both quality and volume, there has been this increase even after the COVID settling.

And for other areas such as travel and rewards, which is actually Rakuten Rebates in Japan and Rakuten Fashion and Rakuten GORA, as you can see, they show very strong growth, especially Rakuten Travel, I must say they’re just booming or they’re really successful. One of the reasons is because of a little less than five million users from the Rakuten Mobile users that are becoming loyal users. And so MNP actually contracts actually will bring benefits to these users as well. And as for the growth investment businesses logistics as the primary part where we have this collaboration with Japan Post, the logistics volume is increasing.

Just looking at the EC market. Overall, in Japan, the difference in volume is that we have about JPY5.8 billion or rather JPY5.8 trillion on an annual basis. As you can see here, so this is how things compare in the past 12 months. Last 12 months, Z Holdings, actually 3.6 or rather JPY3,602 billion and Mercari JPY951 billion, ZOZO JPY544 billion. So we are by far the number one here.

For the domestic e-commerce market, the penetration rate is only 9% still. The world average is 20%, meaning there’s a potential of that doubling by year 2030, GMS of JPY10 trillion is what we are targeting.

In terms of profitability or profits, advertisement is very important where other competitors are struggling, but e-commerce advertising for Rakuten is what we can benefit because it’s close to where people buy things. So in this quarter, we have this increase of 15.8%, JPY483 billion is for this first quarter. And you can see that there’s a lot of growth in the merchandise e-commerce platform advertisement.

For other Internet services, Rakuten Rewards in the United States is quite profitable. And for GMS, it’s US$2.6 billion. On a quarterly basis, it’s over JPY300 billion. And Kogo — Kobo rather, Rakuten Kobo, the user is now more than 60 million users. Asian content at the center for Rakuten Viki over 70 million people using this service and Viber as well or rather TV rather, 76.1 million and Viber, 1.4 billion. It was already profitable, but unfortunately, because of the situation in Ukraine, well, actually, this aggression by Russia actually had a negative impact in terms of the revenue. So there is a little bit of a deficit.

So the next is FinTech, Rakuten Card, Rakuten Bank, Securities, Insurance and Payment, including them, all of them performed pretty well. So let me go one by one. So before that, the overall the revenue and OI. The revenues plus 7.6% Y-o-Y basis, and OI JPY26.6 billion, plus 20.4% Y-o-Y growth and looking at the KPI, Rakuten Card, number of issuance, 28.63 million, close to 30 million will achieve one of our goals. And the number of the accounts of Rakuten Bank and close reaching to 15 million and we will be able to achieve that in near future and Rakuten Securities 10 million accounts, it’s visible now. So we are number one looking on nonconsolidated basis.

And let me talk about the Rakuten Card. The revenue, JPY75 billion. So the point contribution to the revenue changed and then there is no change of the revenue. But looking at the revenue here at the bottom line, so we moved — which used in the lower bar went up. So the — in apple-to-apple basis comparison, revenue went up by 12.0% in OI, non-GAAP OI plus 12.3%, which is JPY12.5 billion.

So it’s performing steadily growing. And then the GTV, even if we grew to this level, I think still GTV is amazing, plus 22.2% Y-o-Y basis. And cashing balance, plus 11.2% Y-o-Y and shopping revolving balance plus 2.4% and the interest on installments plus 25.9% Y-o-Y basis, so it’s performing pretty well.

And the Rakuten Card. Under the leadership of Hosaka-San, we are targeting Triple 3 achievement and 30 million — issued JPY32 million, GTV 30% of GTV share, we are steadily moving up to this target getting closer to this. And as for Rakuten Bank, as you know, on April 21st, the company was listed on Tokyo Security Exchange on Prime Market. And the stock price since then is performing pretty well, and it’s JPY333.2 billion with the current market value as of May 11th and the Rakuten Group’s ownership is getting closer to JPY250 billion. And the Rakuten Bank, when we acquired Rakuten Bank, it was about 300,000 accounts. Now, it went up to 14 million and 9 million on the Bank and Securities accounts. And I think this is the power of Rakuten Ecosystem and how can we achieve the same power in the Rakuten Mobile is one of the issues.

As you know, we have a challenging project in the mobile segment and the so-called burden or the liability has to be reduced. And in order to do that, we are trying to have this disciplined financial policy IPO of the bank, the IPO potential of the Rakuten Securities and also investment, minority investments where the strategic significance has already been achieved then maybe we don’t need to keep the capital there. In other words, exiting is one approach there.

And as you can see here, so the replacement of the first subordinated bond in the first call date is being considered. And also operational aspects includes continued growth in international or rather Internet Services and also the dividends and fees from the growing FinTech segment and also significantly reduced mobile CapEx is another aspect. And also the cost reduction of Rakuten Mobile will also push the revenue further up.

And as was already announced the SAIKYO plan, it’s been only a few hours since the announcement, but already applications are on the rise for that new plan, or actually the plans that we offer.

And finally I’d like to present to you this vision and that is the midterm. For the first time I’m making this presentation, there are three parts towards 2030, what are our visions the way forward. Starting with the Internet Services segment.

Revenue and operating income are both shown here. Revenue on a continuous basis, we will continue the current growth path. So 12% growth is being the target for maintaining that. And right now, 5.9%, there is a profit in some segments, but there are others where it’s not so profitable — but those are not profitable, we want to break even and have profit so that we can have operating income ratio of 50%.

If we can do that, then by 2030, operating income of JPY410 billion will be possible. And 700 billion points or more have been issued already and we need to make efficiency improvements with the points as well. As for FinTech, 40.8% is the operating income margin, but we want to increase that further to 60%, and we can have operating income of JPY330 billion by making improvements. So together, operating income of JPY740 billion to be realized by 2030 is what we are planning or targeting.

In addition, Rakuten Mobile profits or revenue will be added on top of that. We don’t have precise numbers as to our targets, but B2C, 24 million subscribers and B2B target 7 million subscribers are shown here, if we can realize, then we can expect the profit to be even bigger in this segment of Mobile.

And finally, we have more than 200,000 workers at Rakuten and also JPY30 trillion in the GSM or GTV rather. And therefore, we think that our social responsibility is getting larger as well. And therefore, we have to think about sustainability and carry out relevant measures for sustainability. For example, with regard to climate change or global warming as one topic. I think we are responsible for taking measures.

And there are three points here in our strategy and enhancing further the engaged employees enhancing their capabilities and quality. And second is sustainable platforms and services to be provided. And in green, global challenges to be addressed. So these are the three pillars what we’re trying to do.

So to be more specific, growing with our employees. As you know, Rakuten Group uses English as an official language and diversity I think is one of the sources of our strengths. Of course, we are expecting AI to be quite significant going forward, but we need to have data scientists. And I think in the Japanese market maybe Rakuten Group is the only one that have enough AI or data scientists. And therefore, diversity beyond national borders is something that is needed. And in various ways we need to be inclusive, welcoming different kinds of human resources so that, that can be translated into strength.

And the second aspect of providing sustainable platforms and services basically, of course, we abide by the rules and regulations and pay due attention to privacy protection in conducting our business. And finally, addressing global challenges, basically greener, cleaner is what we are trying to realize. For our business foundation, we need to, of course, have the ethical business practices, information security and privacy as well as product and services quality been enhanced as well.

Now this is the 26th year of our company and towards year 2030, Rakuten Group will of course address the Rakuten Mobile situation. 1.4% price increase is where we are. I think it is suppressed at that level. Still, you might think that it’s high, but smartphones are very important, vital to people, dependable, high-quality smartphone services to be realized in Japan is what we’re doing and also the technology that we’re using are to be offered and sold to outside markets as well. So we are really carrying out such major projects.

Now this time, this new roaming agreement with our partner, KDDI, I think, is a major step forward. But I think that is the result of what we have strived to do on our own. I think it’s the end result of the efforts that we have made so far.

With this I’d like to conclude my initial presentation. Thank you.

Question-and-Answer Session

End of Q&A

[Foreign Language]

[Interpreted] This concludes our 2023 first quarter financial results presentation. Thank you very much.