Hello, and welcome to Rakuten's fourth quarter and 2021 fiscal year financial results presentation. First, let's take a look at consolidated results. Here are the key KPIs from 2021. Global GTV reached JPY 26.9 trillion, with 20% year-on-year growth. Domestic e-commerce GMS surpassed JPY 5 trillion. The global membership base is now 1.6 billion members, including over 100 million in Japan. Consolidated revenue hit JPY 1.7 trillion, up 15.5% year-on-year. Rakuten Card has issued 25 million cards, and Rakuten Card shopping GTV reached JPY 14.5 trillion, with a 25% year-on-year increase. In January this year, Rakuten Bank achieved 12 million accounts. In domestic e-commerce, NPS has improved due to more sophisticated logistic functions and UX improvement. As a result, revenue rose 18% and operating income rose 38% year-on-year. Fintech is progressing well. Our customer base is expanding along with cross usage of our services. Revenue and operating income continue to increase. Turning to our mobile business, with the deployment of fully virtualized technology, our cost-competitive mobile network has expanded. In Japan, we achieve 96% population coverage in February, 4 years ahead of schedule, and our network will continue to expand. Roaming costs are expected to decrease significantly going forward as well. Subscribers have now surpassed 5.5 million. As network coverage expands, we will be able to accelerate subscriber acquisition. Group synergies centered on mobile are also steadily progressing. We are building our presence as an industry leader. Rakuten Mobile's technology has received many awards from research organizations. We are the only end-to-end fully virtualized network in commercial operation. In 2021, we won very large orders from various telecom companies. Going forward, we anticipate an improvement in profitability in the mobile business after the second quarter of 2022. We prove the quality of RCP, Rakuten Communications Platform, through the Japanese MNO business, using it as the evidence and showcase to sell our software, hardware, and our cloud platform. These proceeds will enable us to further invest into the mobile network build-out. Next is global expansion of Rakuten Symphony. Building on our domestic success, our worldwide scale opens up huge business opportunities. These profits will also make it possible to further strengthen the domestic network and acquire more customers. In addition to increase the subscriber numbers and ARPU, we aim to strengthen the mobile business status as a pillar of Rakuten ecosystem and maximize the synergy with e-commerce. One of the final highlights of 2021, Rakuten Group, Inc has achieved 100% renewable energy utilization, 4 years ahead of original schedule. In 2022, we established a new department dedicated to achieving carbon neutrality and strengthen our sustainability initiative further. Please take a look at this chart. Consolidated revenue has been rapidly growing continuously. Revenue has reached JPY 1.7 trillion with 15.5% year-on-year growth. Here is a segment-by-segment performance breakdown. In the Internet Services segment, revenue increased 14.7% year-on-year to JPY 1 trillion, and operating income increased by 166.2% year-on-year to JPY 107.5 billion. In the Fintech segment, revenue grew 7.4% year-on-year to JPY 619 billion, and operating income grew 9.6% year-on-year to JPY 89.1 billion. In Mobile segment, we have been proactively investing in future growth and recorded an operating loss. As a result, consolidated revenue was JPY 1.7 trillion, but the non-GAAP operating loss was JPY 225 billion. Now, let's dive into more details for each business. Let's start with our Internet Services. Domestic e-commerce GMS expanded during the pandemic and surpassed JPY 5 trillion in 2021. The interval between each JPY 1 trillion milestone have been getting shorter and shorter. Our next target is JPY 10 trillion. We are enhancing synergy effects. As you can see here, cross-use between Rakuten Ichiba and each of our e-commerce service is also increasing rapidly. At Rakuten Ichiba, the retention of users has progressed, enabling an increase in profits. E-commerce revenue grew 18.1% year-on-year. Operating income grew 37.7% year-on-year to JPY 74.2 billion. JP Rakuten Logistics has taken over Rakuten's logistics activities, accelerating improvements in service quality and profitability. In other internet services, Rakuten Rewards and the sports business are improving, and Viber's operating income increased, resulting in a significant improvement in profitability. Here is a trend in non-GAAP operating income for the overseas businesses, Rakuten Kobo, Viber, and Viki. Thanks to the growth in ad revenue, cost reductions, and other measures, these businesses have begun to drive profitability. Rakuten Rewards was heavily affected by the pandemic in the previous year, but showed significant recovery in 2021. Next, let's look at the ads business. The ad business saw a significant increase in revenue with 22% year-on-year growth to reach JPY 157.9 billion. Sales of online advertising to major consumer goods manufacturers increased significantly, up 35.1% year-on-year. Moving to the performance of our fintech business. Revenue and operating income continue to increase as each service continues to grow and become the main account for more customers. Rakuten Pay revenue increased by nearly 20% year-on-year, keeping annual losses down to about JPY 4.1 billion, while our competitors are making significant losses. Let's look at the performance of each business. In addition to the strong acquisition of credit card members, Rakuten Card's shopping GTV increased significantly with 25.3% year-on-year growth. Next is Rakuten Bank. Rakuten Bank is securing higher revenue and profits by significantly increasing service profits. Rakuten Bank is preparing for an IPO. We believe that through an IPO, Rakuten Bank can benefit from an equity increase, and thus focus more on its growth strategy and further contribute to the Rakuten ecosystem. Here is the performance of Rakuten Securities. Driven by the domestic and U.S. equities, operating revenue continued to grow at a high rate of over 20% year-over-year. The number of new accounts is growing at unparalleled speed in the industry, and we are on track to become number one in terms of customers. Now for the insurance business. Revenue for general insurance decreased due to the optimization of underwriting standards. Operating income increased for the insurance business as a whole due to improvements in the underwriting income and cost reductions. By changing our insurance product portfolio, we expect revenue and profit to increase in the future. We have built one of the most comprehensive fintech ecosystems by promoting cross-use of our services with Rakuten Card as the entry point. Our unique fintech ecosystem contributes to the expansion of the customer base, profit growth, and growth of Rakuten Group as a whole. Now on to mobile. The third-party reports and other analyses have confirmed the cost advantages of Rakuten Mobile's virtualized network. Capital investment and operating costs are 30%-40% lower than legacy technology. Recently, we achieved 96% population coverage, four years ahead of schedule. Having started commercial service only two years ago, this speed is truly astonishing. This is a result of the cooperation of all of the people and companies involved, as well as hard work done on-site in the field. By expanding our own network, we will further reduce roaming areas and re-roaming costs. Due to the cost reduction efforts and increase in paying customers, from the second quarter, earnings should start to improve, and we aim to return to profitability in a short period of time, which would be unprecedented in the history of our mobile industry. We are confident that the future contribution to earnings will be extremely large. Meantime, the combined numbers of MNO and MVNO subscribers reached 5.5 million. The number of new subscribers is steadily increasing as Rakuten's own network area expands. We expect the mobile business to be a driver of further accelerated growth for our ecosystem. Compared to the acquisition of Rakuten Card members, in its first full years, the acquisition rate of Rakuten Mobile subscribers is more than 3x faster. Now, let me talk about Rakuten's unique ecosystem, which is our biggest strength. 2021 represented a further evolution in ecosystem expansion. Data is core to our ecosystem. Rakuten possesses one of the largest data sets in Japan, both online and offline, based on more than 100 million user IDs. Furthermore, by adding data from Rakuten Mobile users, the range and depth of data is increasing, which will be a source of further competitive advantage. Rakuten Mobile has contributed even more to the ecosystem than we originally anticipated. Rakuten Mobile subscribers spend 1.7x more on Ichiba, our e-commerce marketplace, comparing 1 year before and 1 year after signing up. In addition to improving the lifetime value of members who use Rakuten Mobile, these synergy effects are increasing membership value of the entire Rakuten Group. Rakuten expanded its ecosystem through alliances with strategic partners such as Japan Post, Walmart, and Gurunavi. Rakuten Group aims to capture an increasing share of Japan's total national consumption of JPY 352 trillion. To that end, we are developing our online and offline services and positioning the mobile business at the core of these services. Let's move on to talk about our growth strategy. The key theme in 2022, the 25th year since Rakuten's founding, is Tech and Green. Our technology-related operations employ roughly 5,900 engineers around the world. We are expanding globally, including our hubs in Asia, Japan, China, and India, as well as Europe and the U.S. Sustainability is in Rakuten's DNA. We are committed to the world's effort to mitigate climate change and aim to adopt 100% renewable electricity for all our services. We will work with our business partners and consumers to push forward our goal, and we invite all our stakeholders to join this effort. Rakuten Mobile has won numerous global awards, being recognized for the quality of its network. In addition, Rakuten Mobile has been highly evaluated in multiple categories in recent third-party Opensignal reports. Rakuten Symphony has developed and keep developing its own software portfolio to support deployment of the industry's only end-to-end fully virtualized network technology in markets around the world. The product portfolio is already 80% complete. Symphony will be leading the industry with further upgraded capabilities. Building on the large-scale project in Germany in 2021, we aim to increase the overall profitability of the mobile business by accelerating the deployment of Rakuten Symphony. 2022 marks the 25th anniversary of the Rakuten Group. Let's keep working together. We will strive to increase our corporate and stakeholder value by evolving Rakuten ecosystem, achieving sustainable growth, and working together with all our stakeholders. [Non-English content] [Non-English content] [Non-English content] [Non-English content] [Non-English content] [Non-English content] [Non-English content] [Non-English content] [Non-English content] [Non-English content] [Non-English content] [Non-English content] [Non-English content] [Non-English content] [Non-English content] [Non-English content] [Non-English content] [Non-English content] [Non-English content] [Non-English content] [Non-English content] [Non-English content] [Non-English content] [Non-English content] [Non-English content] This is earnings results for the fourth quarter. Revenue grew by double-digit year-over-year, thanks to the strong growth of domestic e-commerce and increased revenue in all segments, including fintech and mobile. Non-GAAP operating loss expanded due to an increase in depreciation expense and network related costs in the mobile business, as well as reduced revenue for the travel business, which did not have the Go To Travel campaign this year. In the same period, non-GAAP operating income at Rakuten Ichiba, Rakuten Card, and other core business showed a strong increase. This is a waterfall chart of non-GAAP operating income. Profit growth in domestic e-commerce and fintech drove overall performance. For Rakuten Ichiba, user retention steadily progressed. In fintech, all businesses showed profit growth. In the mobile segment, losses expanded again due to upfront investments, but base station construction has progressed, and 4G population coverage finally reached 96% earlier this month. We expect mobile business performance to improve from the second quarter of this year. Operating income of other internet services, excluding investment gains or losses, continued to improve. Cost reductions were achieved through business focus and selection. In addition, sports businesses negatively affected by the pandemic, saw some recovery and contributed to the bottom line. In the overseas businesses, Rakuten Rewards has seen a strong return to profit generation, and Viber is now in a position to drive stable profits. In the fourth quarter of 2021, some businesses in the internet service segment were transferred from other internet service to domestic e-commerce. We have made retroactive adjustments accordingly. Now, I will cover the diversification of our financing. We have flexibility to carry out a diverse array of fund procurement as we continue to make upfront investment in the mobile businesses. Examples include equity raising through a third-party allotment, debt financing, including perpetual subordinate bonds, and monetization of our own assets. More recently, in December 2021, we issued JPY 300 billion of domestic bonds, which will also be mostly allocated to the mobile business. In addition, with potential external capital and partnership at Rakuten Symphony and IPO preparations for Rakuten Bank, the financial base of the entire group will be enhanced and autonomous growth of Rakuten ecosystem can accelerate. CapEx in the mobile business has been partially delayed due to the shortage of semiconductors. The amount of capital investment in 2022 is expected to be at the same level as 2021. On the other hand, 4G population coverage has reached 96% due to the acceleration of capital investment. CapEx is expected to be in a steady state from 2023. Consolidated total assets are expanding with a rapid growth at Rakuten Bank and other fintech businesses. In 2021, the capital adequacy ratio improved due to the third-party share allotment. In 2022, we aim for the consolidated capital adequacy ratio to remain at the same level as 2021. In addition, from 2023 onwards, we believe that the ratio will increase as the performance of the mobile business improves. Let's move on to what I see as Rakuten's value by segment. First, regarding domestic e-commerce, looking at the 5-year CAGR of revenue and EV/EBITDA ratio, the valuation of our businesses according to the market consensus seems to be well below the trend line. In the future, we aim to further grow our businesses and enhance our disclosure to gain the understanding of the market. Here is Rakuten's fintech valuation. Considering five years revenue CAGR and P/E ratio, Rakuten is well undervalued versus other global and domestic peers. We will promote the strengths of the fintech ecosystem and its growth potential backed by our competitiveness. Rakuten Mobile seems to be one of the key factor for discounting our valuation. We aim to make the mobile businesses, including Rakuten Symphony, a major pillar and profit source in the future. As you can see, Amazon also had a hard time proving that their business model could be successful. Looking at Amazon stock price trends, it can be said that the business model was proved along with the monetization of the AWS businesses, and the stock price rose significantly. In our mobile businesses as well, we will continue to focus on monetization and to prove the effectiveness of the business model. Rakuten Group membership value consists of active users, cross-use, LTV, and CAC. App and retention rate are used to calculate LTV. In Rakuten Ichiba, the number of reactivated users increased in 2020 due to the pandemic, and the retention rate was pushed up. This resulted in an increase in LTV and boosted membership value. Despite the reactionary decline from the previous year, membership value in the fourth quarter of 2021 expanded with a 2-year CAGR of 8%, so the growth trend is continuing. Rakuten Group will continue to aim to increase membership value and corporate value by expanding our ecosystem. In 2021, domestic e-commerce GMS surpassed JPY 5 trillion. The rate at which each JPY 1 trillion milestone is achieved is accelerating year by year. Even after factoring in a significant growth we saw in 2020 due to demand arising from stay-at-home trends, we continued to see strong growth in 2021. This shows that synergies within the Rakuten ecosystem are being effectively nurtured. Our next goal is to achieve JPY 10 trillion in annual domestic e-commerce GMS. In the fourth quarter, domestic e-commerce GMS expanded steadily despite the impact of the previous year's stay-at-home consumption trend and the Go To Travel campaign. We achieved double-digit growth in annual GMS, which continues to show strong growth. Shopping e-commerce GMS achieved double-digit growth in 2021, despite already achieving significant growth in 2020. Rakuten users have become more highly engaged with our services, so we have been able to maintain high growth rates even after a long period of stay-at-home consumption. Here is our revenues and operating income. Despite the high hurdle presented by the previous year's Go To Travel campaign, due to the continued growth of our e-commerce business centered on Rakuten Ichiba, both revenue and operating income expanded steadily. Here is a waterfall chart showing our operating income. Rakuten Travel was affected by the previous year's Go To Travel campaign. While user retention has steadily progressed for Rakuten Ichiba, leading to increased operating income. In the logistics business, we established JP Rakuten Logistics with Japan Post in July 2021 and succeeded the logistics business operated by Rakuten to the joint venture. This resulted in improved service quality and profitability. E-commerce has expanded significantly since 2020. We are not only growing each businesses, but also expanding cross-use and aiming for further growth. We aim to expand the Rakuten ecosystem by promoting users cross-use from four approaches: point-driven, customer demographic, vertical cross-use, and regional initiatives. This creates synergies between e-commerce services and other businesses. Due to cross-use promotion measures and the growth of Rakuten Ichiba, the number of customer cross-use Rakuten Ichiba and each e-commerce services is steadily increasing. We will continue to focus on expanding cross-use and aim to maximize the lifetime value of our users. Last year in November, as a first step in our effort to improve user convenience and delivery efficiency, we launched the Omatome delivery app. Users can now combine delivery items ordered from multiple Rakuten Ichiba merchants for package delivered by Japan Post. Through this collaboration with Japan Post, we aim to improve customer satisfaction and reduce delivery vehicles' CO2 emissions. In addition, Rakuten Travel has recovered steadily compared to 2019, and the total number of overnight guests turned to positive growth, especially in Q4 2021. Also, we have started offering travel coupons as a thank you gift for participants of the Hometown Tax program in Japan. The number of eligible local governments and accommodation facility is increasing, and the number of participating user is increasing. We believe that this is one of the initiative that will drive growth as travel demand is positioned to recover in the near future. The Fintech segment achieved higher revenue and profit compared to last year as customer base expanded and usage as a main service increased for each service. Rakuten Card secured an increase in profit led by the strong acquisition of members and an increase in transaction value due to the recovery in offline consumption. The customer base continued to expand strongly with Rakuten Bank surpassing 12 million accounts in January 2022, and Rakuten Securities accounts surpassing 7 million. For Rakuten Card, the number of cards issued surpassed 25 million, and the number of second Rakuten Card also reached 1 million just 7 months after the full-scale launch last June. Rakuten Card has announced our next goal of achieving the Triple 3, and we are on track for all three targets. For shopping GTV, we continue to outperform the industry by maintaining positive growth even during the pandemic. The annual transaction value growth rate in 2021 was over 25%, recovering to pre-pandemic levels. In addition, with the increased popularity of buy now, pay later, the number of customers using installment payment for Rakuten Card has increased, and the amount of installment payment value had more than tripled compared to 2017. At Rakuten Bank, the number of payroll accounts increased by 55.4%, and the number of payment transactions increased by 17.4% compared to the same period last year. Many customers are using Rakuten Bank as their main account for daily life. The profile of new account holders at Rakuten Securities is diversifying. One noteworthy trend is the increasing percentage of women customers reaching nearly half now. Due to the expansion of the asset building business, the number of new account openers in their thirties or younger, which was about half in 2016, has increased to nearly 70% in 2021. In addition, many investment newcomers are also choosing Rakuten Securities. Both Rakuten Life and Rakuten General Insurance are doing well, led by internet sales in particular. In fact, Rakuten General Insurance online sales of automobile insurance have made great progress. Thanks to the benefit of website improvements, increased online discount rates, and attracting customers from the Rakuten ecosystem. The Rakuten Pay app, which is an integrated app that contains various payment services, continue to be a strong touch point for customers, being used in many daily situations. For example, the amount of Rakuten Cash added through the app increased by 146% in 2021. Fintech is enhancing cross-use by strengthening cooperation among companies and providing highly convenient services for customers. In the near future, in addition to Rakuten Card and Rakuten Point, we plan to add Rakuten Cash as a new payment option for Rakuten Securities Investment Trust. As a result of these strengthened collaborations, cross-use is steadily expanding. The number of customers using all three, Rakuten Card, Rakuten Bank, and Rakuten Securities, increased by 89% year-on-year. The Fintech segment will continue to promote cross-use of Fintech services with Rakuten Card as a point of entry, and contribute to the expansion of the customer base and the profit base of each Fintech company, which lead to the growth of the Rakuten Group. This month, we were delighted to announce that Rakuten Mobile's 4G population coverage reached 96%. Compared to the original plan submitted to the MIC, the industry regulator, this was about four years ahead of schedule. This achievement is the result of fully virtualized mobile technology, close work with our partners, and the collective efforts of the Rakuten Group. In addition to outdoor base stations, we utilize various products such as small cells, femtocells that correspond to different areas and use cases, and we built one of the world's largest Open RAN networks with a total of more than 200,000 cells. This guarantees capacity and speed required by our customers. With the expansion of coverage, usage of Rakuten's network continues to increase. The number of MNO subscribers is steadily increasing, even without aggressive marketing and campaigns. This month, the number of subscribers of MNO and MVNO combined exceeded 5.5 million. The proportion of MNP as a source of new subscribers is continuously increasing. We know that MNP subscribers have higher ARPU and lower churn rate, so an increase in the MNP ratio also drives improvement in financial performance. These are the earnings results for the mobile segment in the fourth quarter. Revenue increased from the third quarter as more MNO subscribers became paying subscribers after coming off the one-year free campaign, device sales increased, and Rakuten Symphony started to contribute to the top line. Depreciation expenses and network-related costs continued to increase due to the accelerated expansion of Rakuten's network. Operating loss has expanded due to continued upfront investment in the MNO business. Losses should start to shrink from the second quarter due to an increase in paying users, an acceleration of subscriber growth, and reduction in roaming costs. We expect Q1 to represent a bottoming out of the losses and profitability to improve thereafter. Rakuten Mobile was ranked the number one mobile carrier for customer satisfaction in a third-party survey in December 2021. Ease of connectivity, which has been an issue, will be rapidly resolved by achieving 96% population coverage and by densification of base stations. We expect that the pace of customer acquisition will accelerate further in the future. Greetings to all. 2021 was a significantly important year for Rakuten. We previously made some projections and some predictions. Today, I am here to tell you we are already delivering on those for our shareholders. We promised a significant important commercial deal, and we concluded a contract with German MNO 1&1 in August, and delivery is well underway and on schedule. We have met our coverage obligation in Japan about 4 years ahead of plan, and we've introduced numerous products in 2021, most notably Symware, the next generation on-site platform converging multiple network functions, RAN, cloud, and IP routing. Symworld, our platform marketplace and portal, making planning, design, dimensioning, and operation of networks seamless and frictionless. I am very proud of what the team have delivered and look forward to this year incremental success. Rakuten Symphony accelerated journey started with the idea to do things differently. An idea that a 21st century network requires 21st century thinking, 21st century technology, and 21st century business model. We are a disruptor. We adopted best-of-breed technology to build our network, and we are now making a business out of helping others to do it. We have proven this disruption in our domestic market, and we are implementing the change for our clients. In just few years, we build and launch our network in Japan, acquired three innovative companies, grew the team from a handful to over 2,000 engineers, 90% of which are working in R&D and establish entities in numerous countries around the world. I feel very confident in our ability to deliver on the promise, to disrupt the market, to continue to lead in innovation, and grow the business at an unprecedented pace. The opportunity ahead of us is massive. The spend on a network build-out will see a significant ramp-up in the next few years as operators start rolling out 5G networks at a commercial scale. We are well-positioned to capture our fair share of this spend. We believe strongly that our domain-focused business unit, along with strong sales and delivery teams, will deliver. If you look at the total addressable market in each of the domains, you will see that each business unit can stand on its own as a separate company. I am very excited about the potential for each of our business unit as I look at this massive opportunity ahead of us. Our bold ambition to lead industry transformation is well underway. We've successfully concluded on numerous contracts in 2021. Most notably is the 1&1 contract in Germany, and there are more to come. The results were multi-billion dollar bookings. We have built a significant pipeline of interested customers for Rakuten Symphony. Core to our values is to lead technology innovation. We have built our organization around innovation engines. We call them business units, focused around the five domains of the new world telco networks. We have over 2,000-strong engineering-focused organization, made 3 acquisitions, rolled out over 70 products and solutions, and continue to invest heavily in our engineering capability. The industry has woken up and started to listen. We've been fortunate to receive accolades or recognition for our domestic network as well as our innovative culture. I am very happy with all these awards, most notably the Global Award in 2021. I have recently had the opportunity to join discussions with governments and regulators around the world. This is a good sign the industry is taking us seriously. Looking ahead in 2022, we will focus on our execution and delivery in Japan, Germany, and other countries and region. We look forward to securing a number of clients for Symware in 2022. We are considering a couple more acquisition and adjacencies of our stack while we continue to focus on the organic development of our portfolio of capabilities I shared with you earlier. Last but not least, accelerate the build-out of our R&D, sales, and delivery teams to build the foundation for the next decade with the objective to lead, transform, and disrupt this industry. Thank you very much for your time today, and I am looking forward for another successful year for Rakuten. Rakuten's advertising revenue increased significantly in 2021 due to the expansion of online advertising amid the acceleration of digital transformation. The revenue growth rate has been even higher than our domestic e-commerce business rate, contributing to an improvement in the profit margin. Here is an analysis of the growth of the advertising business in 2021. Along with expansion of e-commerce, the main growth factor was an acceleration of ad placements by internal advertisers, meaning merchants on Rakuten Ichiba, and external advertisers, meaning major consumer goods manufacturers. In particular, ad placements by major consumer goods manufacturers grew significantly in 2021. This was due to the expansion of O2O efforts aimed at mutual online and offline customer transfers. While leveraging online ads that can measure effectiveness, internal ad inventory and ad revenue from the external ad sector are accelerating year by year, maintaining very high growth rate. The Rakuten Group has accumulated a large amount of highly accurate data based on consumption behavior data and payment data, both online and offline. Rakuten has one of the largest collections of data, both in quantity and quality, in Japan. In addition to the data we have accumulated to capture the expanding O2O market, our growing mobile business will allow us to accumulate data that is completely different from our existing demographics, leading to further growth. By making use of these advantages, we can expand online and offline integrated ad revenue and further contribute to the profit margin growth of the entire group. As people's lifestyle has changed significantly with the spread of COVID, Rakuten continue to respond to these changes and maintain a high rate of growth. Thanks to high user retention rate and cross-use of services, both the number of the active users and cross-use increased steadily. This is also remarkable in comparison with the previous year, which was significantly boosted by the lifestyle changes of the first year of the pandemic. Mobile is expected to be the driver of the faster accelerated growth of the Rakuten ecosystem. Compared to the acquisition of the Rakuten Card members, the rate of the acquisition of the Rakuten Mobile users has been more than 3x faster. By its nature indispensable to user lifestyles, the mobile service increase user loyalty to the Rakuten ecosystem and create synergies with other services. Rakuten Mobile clearly promote increase of the other services. Looking at the ecosystem usage of the Rakuten Mobile subscribers one year after sign-up, 35% become new users of Rakuten Ichiba. Similarly, 20% become new users of Rakuten Card, 10% for Rakuten Bank, and 12% for Rakuten Pay. In addition, for users who had already been using the Rakuten Ichiba, GMS per person increased significantly following mobile subscription. This data compares the purchase volume of an existing Rakuten Ichiba user one year before and after joining the Rakuten Mobile. After subscribing to Rakuten Mobile, average Ichiba market spending rise by nearly 70%. We see improvement of the customer LTV through use of the mobile services itself, and we also see these synergies increasing the membership value of the entire Rakuten Group. Rakuten's technology division employs approximately 5,900 engineers in 10 cities spread across 7 countries around the world. In Japan, more than 60% of our engineers come from a non-Japanese background, and this diversified global workforce continue to challenge and drive innovation. Rakuten India continues to expand its operations, and with the rapid increase in employees, we will move into a brand-new premise in downtown Bangalore this year. The Rakuten Blockchain Lab in Belfast, Northern Ireland, continues research and development on the latest in blockchain technologies, including crypto assets and NFTs. In addition to the Rakuten Institute of Technology in Tokyo, our branches in Boston, Singapore, Paris, and Bangalore continue contributing to the Rakuten Group with cutting-edge research in natural language processing and practical application of the multi-language translation tool, Rakuten Translate, which is based on deep learning technology. Additionally, we are proactively contributing to the creation of the sustainable future, and we have committed to data center operations that utilize renewable energy to further contribute to the realization of a carbon neutral society. In Rakuten Institute of Technology, or RIT, we fully leverage our global presence in our R&D efforts. Here, please let me introduce two very exciting moonshot projects. One is quantum technology and computing research based on Cambridge, U.S. Together with QuEra Computing, which is a company established by Harvard and MIT professors, Rakuten is exploring the potential of quantum technology and computer. Quantum computer is still very early stage, but it is likely that it will become game-changing technology in 10 years. With the potential to host quantum computers in our cloud, we are very excited to work with QuEra Computing. Another example is a collaboration between Rakuten Medical and Rakuten India to develop cancer treatment called photoimmunotherapy. Leveraging the talent in Rakuten India with machine learning capability, we conduct research in order to identify biomarkers of patients who respond well to our treatments. This understanding, in return, should help Rakuten Medical to further develop the treatments. As almost everybody has the experience of losing close family or friends from cancer, contributing to such treatment is very meaningful, and we are proud to challenge this problem as Rakuten Group. Rakuten Group productivity has continued to steadily improve. Excluding the mobile, logistics, and investment businesses, operating profit per full-time employee and profit per total cost grew by over 20% year-over-year. These are the three major initiatives behind the improvement of these indicators. The number of employees participating in Kaizen activities exceeded 4,000 people. Through cost optimization, we achieved a profit contribution of approximately JPY 12 billion. Through improvement in unprofitable business, approximately JPY 3 billion. Group-wide participation in Kaizen activities, or QCC, also continued to significantly increase in 2021. The result of these activities was the accumulation and knowledge sharing of approximately 1,000 examples of improvements which we calculate contribution over JPY 3 billion to the bottom line. Since 2021, the introduction of QCC in the mobile business, which is one of the most important business, has been steadily progressing, and it's expanding at a pace about two years ahead of existing businesses. In 2022, we aim to accelerate the initiative to contribute to the group's profit by focusing on supply chain management, call center and shop operations, and logistics costs. Rakuten continuously measures Net Promoter Scores, an indicator used to evaluate and improve customer experience. As you can see, the Net Promoter Score of the Rakuten Group was negative versus competition in 2017, but has been continuously outperforming the competition since 2018. The score in the second quarter of 2021 was up 11.5 points. We also continued to measure the rate of users who report dissatisfying experiences at all Rakuten Group services. Over the past year, we have reduced the ratio of dissatisfied experience by 0.8% through the group quality assurance activities such as implementing standards and emphasizing the process quality as well as utilization of the skills improved in hundreds of QCC activities. By revising our compensation policy and other measures, we continue to reduce our turnover rate with a 3% improvement over 2017. Rakuten aims to deliver on our mission of empowering people and society both now and in the future as we work toward realizing the carbon neutral society by 2050. Through an environment-conscious platform established with our businesses, partners, and users, we will continue to take on new challenges. We will also continue to be transparent with disclosure of relevant information. In 2022, we will work to strengthen our internal organization to focus on these issues. We will establish a new environmental department directly under the COO and implement regular working group and all-employee meeting to focus on environmental topics. We will work to set science-based targets in line with recognized global standards and report on our progress against these targets. In 2021, we expect to achieve our target for Rakuten Group, Inc. to adopt 100% renewable electricity. Now we will aim to do the same for the entire Rakuten Group, including major consolidated subsidiaries by 2023. The Rakuten Group has been operating COVID-19 vaccination centers since May 2021. There has been zero incidents, and the time required for vaccine recipients from reception to vaccination has been reduced to 3 minutes and 30 seconds. With this safe and efficient system, nearly 900,000 vaccinations have been administered at four sites nationwide. In 2022, the Rakuten Group will support the operations of large-scale vaccination centers at Noevir Stadium Kobe and booster shots. Rakuten Group is also offering vaccination opportunities at centers in Tokyo. The total number of vaccinations administered by the Rakuten Group is expected to reach 1 million by the end of March. Through its safe and efficient system developed during the pandemic, the Rakuten Group will continue to contribute to COVID-19 vaccinations. Since Rakuten's founding, our mission is to contribute to society, working hand-in-hand with our stakeholders to meet their expectations and create a sustainable future for all. In order to prioritize our efforts and drive positive change even more effectively, we have established what we call our materiality, which helps us identify important issues that Rakuten should address. We have categorized those issues into focus areas. Let me introduce examples of our efforts for each of them. We believe creating work environments that ensure the well-being of employees is critical. Last quarter, we are certified as a Good Health Management Corporation by METI and a Sports Yell Company by the Japan Sports Agency in recognition of health-related initiatives conducted online. Enhancing corporate culture remains our priority. We also continue to encourage communication among employees through one-on-one meetings across the Group and through the Allstar platform at Rakuten Mobile, for example. We actively engaged with Rakuten Mobile suppliers in 2021 based on the Rakuten Group sustainable procurement instruction. This instruction was established to contribute positively to society through our supply chain. This year, we'll leverage this experience and replicate our efforts across our entire ecosystem. We consider climate change, resource management, and biodiversity to be issues of critical importance. From these three perspectives, we are taking advantage of our different platforms and partnerships to promote initiatives across our value chain, downstream and upstream. Finally, our efforts to proactively disclose information on our ESG initiatives have been positively received. Rakuten has been selected as a constituent of major ESG indices and received various certifications. With our slogan Work Together, we'll continue to enhance our governance and sustainability activities to empower society over the long term. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining Rakuten Group's 2021 full year and fourth quarter financial results meeting. Now it is the Q&A session from the media and investors and analysts. First, let me introduce today's participants. Hiroshi Mikitani. Kenji Hirose. Masayuki Hosaka. Yoshihisa Yamada. Tareq Amin. Kentaro Hyakuno. Yasufumi Hirai. Makoto Arima. Kazunori Takeda. Nine management are joining this Q&A session. Now into the Q&A session. This Q&A session will be conducted using simultaneous English and Japanese interpretation. Please select the language you would like to hear in your audio feed from the Zoom nav bar at the bottom of your screen. Please do not select Mute Original Audio. When the interpreter speaks, the original volume will be lowered, and you will hear the interpreter's voice over the speaker. The presentation materials shown have been aligned with Japanese. If necessary, please download the presentation material from the investor's page on the corporate site, and we'll start by taking questions from the media for the first half of this session, and then we'll take questions from investors for the rest of the hour. Let's get started, and please raise your hand to ask a question. For those joining from their PC, beneath the participants gallery view, you will find the Zoom nav bar, and please click Raise Hand to ask a question. If you are joining from your mobile phone, please tap More and then tap Raise Hand in order to ask a question. If your name is called, please make sure your mic has been unmuted before asking your question. If you're joining by phone, please tap the star key followed by 9 to raise your hand. We will unmute you so that you can ask a question. We will take question from the media first, and then you can also inquire by Q&A form. Thank you. Please note that we can only accept questions regarding the results. In order to answer as many questions as possible, please keep your questions to two questions per person. If you have any question, please raise your hand. Thank you. Freelancer, Ishikawa-san, you have a question? Please go ahead. My name is Ishikawa. I'm a freelance journalist. Thank you. 96% population coverage in mobile, congratulations. Now, going forward, because you have reached that target, platinum band, it might be easier for you to apply for that to MIC. So what is your stance on that? What is your thinking? Because after 3G, of course, some of the carriers might not give back what they have been given, so what do you think? Okay. Mikitani-san. Well, Ishikawa-san, that's a difficult question to answer. I'm sure you understand that that's difficult to answer. Because to begin with, for the government, you know, they actually gave permission to this fourth carrier, that is us, and the intent was to promote or enhance competition so that the market price will be more rational. The mobile service or the price will be more rationalized or streamlined and thereby enhancing convenience for the people. That was the idea. In the mid-band that we have now, of course, with innovation and ideas, we can pretty much cover a lot. With platinum band available, of course, we in terms of efficiency for, of course, we can actually compete better with the three other competitors, the incumbent carriers. That's our wish. I hope that is gonna happen. That's the extent to which I can answer your question. Apologies to you. Well, that's fine. Thank you. Thank you very much and let's move on to the next. NewsPicks, Hatano-san, please. NewsPicks, Hatano, can you hear my voice? Yes, we can hear you. Thank you. Rakuten Bank IPO, I have two questions. Last fall, you announced that you will be starting the preparation, and at the very beginning of your presentation, I think you touched upon that. What is the current situation of IPO preparation? The timing of IPO, if you have any comment, please, share that with us. When you do this IPO, I think the financing would be possible. Rakuten Bank's synergy to the group, what do you think about it? For IPO preparation, it's progressing as scheduled. Our plan is to go IPO before the end of this year. It will be the second half or close to the year-end timing for the IPO, and it's progressing pretty well. That's my understanding. As you know, other businesses, we have licensed businesses, but the banks, so it has quite strong characteristics of licensing business. Having the thicker capital, so the financial health would become better and then the various ALM would be possible with that. Profitability can be raised to a large extent. That's how we, I think. Therefore, as for this, the bank, so the overseas and neobank or KakaoBank, well, they have a great valuation when they IPO'd. Rakuten Bank, if we can follow suit, then we will be able to raise financing to some extent. We can sustain the synergy. That's how I view. By having a heavy equity, and then when we do the affiliated method thing, and then I think we can sustain the current the start. That's all. Thank you very much. Thank you. Next, Tsuhan Shimbun, Miss Kawanishi-san, please, you have your hand raised. Yes. Kawanishi is my name. I'm from Tsuhan Shimbun. Nice to have this opportunity. This is about logistics or delivery. I think speedy delivery is one challenge that you have, and I'd like to ask you more about that. Yahoo recently started quick commerce, what they call quick commerce. What is your thinking around that kind of an approach? Any thinking about that? Okay. Kazunori Takeda, can you address this question first? I am in charge of logistics. My name is Takeda. Well, for logistics and distribution, we intend to have various forms of evolution. What I mean is the SCM chain, for example, if you look at the total, we are a marketplace. That's the nature of our business. The freight or the shipments will come out of the various warehouses of the merchants. Of course, that we would like to have the Rakuten Super Logistics, JP Rakuten joint venture that hopefully can handle as many as possible, and we will have inventory there. Together with the merchants, of course, we're trying to raise that volume, increase that, and we're taking on that challenge. The question is where to have the inventory, and I think for quick delivery, that would hold the key. Another aspect is, of course, we deliver to all corners of the country, and therefore we have the fulfillment centers in different locations, and that location is very important. Initially or originally, of course, we were to cover the last one mile as well. But with the JP Rakuten joint venture this time, we actually have the areas for delivery owned by JP, so we can cover all the different parts of Japan and therefore that leads to a shorter lead time in terms of delivery. Also, we can actually have the same inventory in different multiple fulfillment stations, and that also translates into shorter lead time. Through such efforts, quick delivery can be made possible. That's another path. Many, many of the users' needs is such that they buy more in e-commerce and therefore, they're visited by delivery people many times a day. Sometimes the resident is away, not home. That's inconvenient on the part of the receivers. Also when you think about CO2 emissions, that's a negative as well. Taking those aspects into account, there might be people who are not in a rush to receive the purchased products. Why don't we have combined deliveries and have just one shipment for multiple merchandise? Partially, we are conducting experiments with JP and also the unmanned drop off of parcels and other things are being tried as well so that we can have logistics revolution, so to speak, we can realize together with JP. That is what we're hoping to achieve. Thank you. Okay, thank you very much. I think the key point of the question has to do with the delivery, right? Yes. For that aspect, well, Rakuten, of course, you know, we are providing so many a variety of services that are unprecedented maybe in the world. I think it would be quite difficult to take care of everything by ourselves. Collaborations or alliances with other partners, not just with one company, but Demae-can, the food delivery service, actually is using our service as well so that people can get meals delivered. That kind of a partnership arrangement would be effective as well. There are many things to do in this area. Actually this area or field is highly competitive in my understanding. Therefore, for us, logistics, 51%, is actually dependent on JP, Japan Post, and the so-called cloud delivery, quick shopping, maybe that's the Japanese term to express that. Well, on that notion, we would like to partner with various entities. Well, from the viewpoint of customers, as long as they have the IDs of Rakuten and accumulate points, that's theirs, they're happy. I think, partnering or partnerships, I think, or alliances, will be a primary method that we think we will be using going forward. Thank you. Okay. Move to the next. Freelance, Ishino-san, please. Thank you very much. Freelance Ishino is speaking. I have a question about Rakuten Mobile. In 2022 Q2 the profitability will be recovering. So far, how much contribution is expected? Roaming percentage, the current status of the roaming percentage, and then to what extent that will be reduced, therefore it would contribute to improving the profitability. I would like to know the breakdown of loss making today, if you can share the information, I would like to know that. Population coverage, 96% for you achieved. After that, what would you like to do about it? I think you mentioned the AST leverage, one of the thing that was in Mikitani-san's presentation. Do you have sufficient capacity? That is the part of the question. AST, so there are three things. Rural area or underpopulated area, we are going to use SD, and that is 99%, mid-ninety, 90% to high 90%. We would like to use our Rakuten own network, so 95%-99%, so we would like to utilize our Rakuten own network. AC, as mentioned in my presentation. For example, in case of disaster, when our site goes down and then back up, so we can utilize it for that purpose flexibly. For the urban area, it's not sufficient. In those rural area or disaster, I think the coverage or the capacity is enough. The capacity, I visited Osaka the other day, and if you have mobile phone, please go to Osaka Station and around, and then you will understand how the speed of Rakuten Mobile speed around there. That would be a good surprise to you. The people would migrating to the use of 5G and including Tesla. 5G frequency high frequency rate is very high. In urban area, then the way you require the high capacity. Sub-6, and then the station or Shibuya Scramble or stadium, those areas, millimeter wave can cover those areas. The 5G deployment cost comparing to other players, we are much cheaper. That is our characteristic. In terms of the device or equipment, we are partnering with others, and also we have our own design. By having them, we are able to reduce the cost to a large extent. Roaming cost, so the how much percentage is not disclosed, I believe. It's a very big burden. That is the fact. It's been shrinking comparing to the old date. The user is increasing, but the percentage is decreasing. Therefore, we have to take balance between the two. That will be decreasing. Yamada-san, how are we disclosing the information related to that? Going back to the slide about the base station, the map, next page. I showed you the traffic volume percentage in this graph. This is Rakuten's coverage area and data usage rate. It's growing. That is how you interpret this map. It would be decreasing, not the level of the JPY 10 billion. Thank you very much. Okay, we have limited time, meaning two more questions from the press, and that will be it for the press people. Please do understand. From Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, Ichikawa-san, you have a hand up. Please. Ichikawa from Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper. Thank you very much. Thank you. I have two questions. First, about the group's ecosystem. Mobile is added to the ecosystem, so do you think all the pieces are present and ready? Or going forward, what sort of synergy do you expect to have for further growth? Also, I think, for the entire group, do you think you will be getting closer to being profitable in the black ink? Okay, second question is, Kishida administration talks about having this prevention of the virus coming in to Japan, so what do you think about that going forward? Ecosystem, well, finance or financial, fintech, insurance card, Rakuten Pay, insurance, you know, general insurance, life insurance, Edy, and bank, and trust bank, investment trust and the securities. In addition, in Europe and Taiwan, we have licenses already acquired for financial activities. I think for fintech or financial sector, we have pretty much all what we need. Now, I think rather than ecosystem, we need to think about the cloud. One of the potential, great potential for Rakuten Mobile, I think, is related to the cloud, a cloud being developed or created by ourselves. As a by-product, we will see many things coming or emerging. For example, you know, of course, platform for mobile, Symphony is going to sell to different people, not necessarily end to end. Of course, major companies like AT&T are actually purchasing from us now. That opportunity is huge, really. In that overall landscape, new contents, how it's going to look like is what we have to think about. Rakuten Europe, for example. About Rakuten TV. If you purchase or subscribe to Smart TV, Rakuten TV will come with it. Smart TV is the foundation on which you will watch Rakuten TV, Netflix, and Amazon Prime. Of course, rather than competing against those channels, the platform will be created on top. That's becoming successful in Europe, so by taking that approach, I think contents will likely be added to the ecosystem going forward. Again, of course, it's not really head-on type of, you know, financing burden being borne, but rather we would like to really go into the contents business. It doesn't really mean a major financing or investments, but we want to be smart there. LINE and Viber, I think, will become very important in the overall ecosystem, and we would like to therefore strengthen those. I'm talking from a global perspective. Viber, it used to have more than JPY 10 billion in the red, but it is now profitable. Therefore, I think, the management capabilities overseas is enhanced pretty much. Profit and loss situation of the group overall, Hirose-san, can you address that part of the question? Yes, for this fiscal period, we're not disclosing that information. I, as I explained in the presentation video. For the net asset portion, of course, we would like to have a really sound firm management. Anyway, mobile business will bottom out in Q2 of this year. In 2023 and beyond, we are expecting a major improvement. Of course, the market situation among others might have some impacts, but this is basically what we're expecting for the future. Okay. Timing is important for one, but mobile business model, the core of that business model is what I would like to remind you. 5 million, 10 million, I'm sure it will grow to 20 million and so forth. It says in the market 7% or so, but that actually number, that number includes the corporate contracts as well. Purely consumer-based calculations, we'll say 10% is what we're aiming for. For corporate customers, you know, we have like 400,000 clients to begin with, therefore, I think we can be pretty competitive already. Of course, we have just started and therefore, it's not really corporate services that we're really focusing on right now, but we will. Once we start, I'm sure that there will be a rapid pickup by the corporate customers as well. For the corporates, maybe 20%-25% market share might be the market share that we would like to aim for. Now, for the prevention of virus from coming into Japan. Well, when you're in Japan, you don't really feel it so much. When I talk with many CEOs abroad, and they ask me, "When is Japan going to open up?" Of course, often covered in the news is the students that want to come to Japan to study. Of course, the world is fighting against COVID-19. I think, you know, we're talking about a realistic opening up of the economy and COVID-19, especially Omicron cases are increasing in Japan already. What's the statistical benefit of closing the country? That's quite maybe questionable. To be extreme, maybe, you know, people that try to come into Japan have gone through many PCR tests, and so that's safe. You have to think about that as well. People need to think of living with COVID-19. We call it with corona or COVID. Of course, the United States, for example, had this record high growth of economy, and so it was mentioned just recently in some of the conversations. Against that backdrop, you know, Japan is continuing this closure, blocking outsiders from coming in. We're lagging behind others by a year or a year and a half in terms of economic recovery. I'm wondering if Japan will not be forgotten by the rest of the world. I worry about that. I think we need to waste no time, but think about what we should do about letting foreigners come into Japan, because I think it's maybe better that we open up and just could stop doing what we're doing right now. Thank you. Okay, thank you very much. Okay. We move to the next. Freelance, Onishi-san, please. Good to talk to you. Symphony and Mobile would become a booster, and then globalization would proceed. Viber is now materialized. So far, how much percentage of business coming from overseas? 2-year or 3-year or 5 years after. Having that span, how much that global the business portion would be growing as you move forward? Right. Today's overseas breakdown will be covered by Hirose-san later. GTV, Rakuten Rewards already went beyond JPY 1 trillion, and looking at the overall U.S. business, and it's already turned into the black or the profit or about to becoming profit. One of the key word is Rakuten Symphony. Why? The mobile operator, such as Telefónica and I'm talking to various mobile operators, including them, and then they would like to do this OTT as a services. And it's not a simple connectivity, that's not fine. The adopting our platform and then the other service partnership can be concluded and then grow with them. That is how and what I would like to do. At the end of the day, Japan and overseas as a sales portion to become 50/50. That is our goal. That's all. Thank you very much. Hirose-san, please add some comment. The overseas business portion is less than 20% today. That is my understanding. Let me double-check. Anyway, as Mikitani-san mentioned, including Symphony, we would like to grow the overseas business portion, and that's our expectation. Symphony is the corporation here in Japan, but the target customers are located overseas. Thank you very much. The several hundred billion JPY is expected business side. Thank you very much. This concludes the media Q&A session for the financial results meeting. Next, we will answer questions from investors and analysts. You can actually inquire by Q&A form if you like. Please limit your question to anything having to do with earnings. Maximum two questions, and please ask both questions at the same time. Okay. HSBC, Neil-san, you have your hand up, please. Thank you. Good afternoon, and congratulations on reaching that 96% population coverage. Thank you. I assume now that your focus will switch to 5G. Can you share any details on the number of 5G base stations you have deployed or the population coverage, both now and also your targets for this year? Thank you. Okay. I think Yamada-san or Tareq will, you know, follow me. We have to really make sure that there are basically three different types of 5G. One is millimeter wave, which is pretty fast, but the penetration is basically just kind of straight, right? We also have a Sub-6, and we also have what we call kind of not fake, but kind of fake 5G. What we are focusing on is real high-speed 5G. We believe our technology is competitive or even stronger than the technology which other three incumbents are trying to deploy, including beamforming and so forth. This one, probably Tareq can follow. With regard to actual coverage as of now and our intent, Yoshi can follow up. Obviously, we just started our telecom company two years ago. The beauty of software-defined network is that we just kind of need to upgrade our software, and definitely we wanna go for the band wise. We have to, you know, deploy the suitable physical hardware antenna. But the benefit of the 5G and basically transforming to 5G from 4G is relatively easy for us compared with other company. On top of that, probably we are the only company which provide Narrowband IoT nationwide. So maybe, Tareq, you can just talk about a little bit of technological difference between us and the incumbents. Yoshi, please follow up with the actual coverage data and so forth. Thank you. On 5G specifically, I think what differentiate us from day zero is our selection of the technology base for the radio base station. To my knowledge, we're the only operator worldwide that 100% of our base station for Sub-6 employs what we call Massive MIMO. Massive MIMO is really what everybody wants to evolve towards, is the ability for you to track users on an individual basis. It improves coverage, capacity. As Mickey indicated, for us, 5G was not an afterthought. It's something that we architected from day zero. Our base stations today have a common fiber, which is dark fiber, that reaches all of them, so we don't have to worry about mobile backhaul, the strength of towers. The antennas that we use are all active antennas. By the way, this goes the same for millimeter waves. We use 32T, 32R for Sub-6, and we use analog beamforming for millimeter wave also to improve coverage and capacity. In terms of technology, the latest report, if you look at the report that was published by Opensignal recently, it shows clearly that Rakuten Mobile Network has the fastest 5G coverage in Japan. There is no secret to this. It just shows the power and the elegance of this technology. The second thing, to Mickey's point, I wanna encourage you to ask a question why Narrowband IoT has not succeeded in general. Well, the answer is very simple. It is because the cost and the implications when you run and manage network through hardware, it is in the JPY billions. In Rakuten Mobile network, it's just a software flag on or off to activate narrowband IoT, and this will continue by the way, whether it is 4G, 5G, or 6G. That's a big, big differentiator in the technology. Yoshi, you wanna take the coverage? Yes. We don't disclose population coverage for 5G. In terms of the number of 5G base stations, it's about 4,000. Quickly expanding, we will obviously more than double, probably add maybe, you know, at least 10,000, this year, so quickly expanding. Of course, you don't just need the base stations, but you also need 5G devices for people to get benefits. You know, we're looking at, you know, the penetration of 5G devices. Anyhow, because we only have single spectrum for 4G, you know, we think 5G is very important to, you know, provide capacity and speed. We will quickly ramp up once there's enough penetration of 5G devices. Neil, if you have time, please go and visit Osaka Station in front. There we already have 5G beamforming, massive MIMO. Traffic there, half of the traffic goes to 5G. More and more, the 5G will take. Many people ask, do you have enough capacity? This is not a problem because most of the traffic will be 5G as a matter of fact. For the 5G we have enough spectrum. Right. Thank you. Okay, move on to the next. Clover Management, David Lee, please. David? David, could you unmute yourself? Hello. Now we can hear you, David. Oh, hi. Thank you, Mickey. Hey, now congratulations on the 96% nationwide coverage that was achieved earlier than expected. Now that you have made this great achievement, tell us what your plan is on subscriber growth going forward. I know you touched on that a little while earlier. It has been about 130,000 per month. Should we expect this number to start rising? And what strategy will you use to help you increase this number? Because the other existing three competitors came out with different price plans in order to compete with you. They came out with price plans that were similar to yours. That's my first question. Thanks, Mickey. You have to, David, think about it, you know, 20 GB is not enough for, you know, era of 5G. You have to compare, if you use 50 GB, 100 GB, how much do you need to pay for ahamo or, you know, whatever, like, you know, LINEMO or, I forgot the other name. We're talking about, you know, probably sometimes 3x-5x more expensive than, you know, what usually people pay. It is very obvious that when you go to 5G, people will consume much more data than before. These are our target customers. That's gonna mainstream. I think the high volume users, the cost advantage or price difference is significant even with their, the plan they kind of deployed. For the very light users, obviously, we are very, very competitive. Our model, one thing I just want to emphasize is we wanna be very, very open and very fair. For the people who do not use much data, we're gonna be very cheap. People who use a lot of data, we are going to 3x, 4x, sometimes 5x cheaper than our competitors. When we explain about our price plan, basically please compare unlimited data, not like people who are just using 20 GB. That's a kind of a marketing gimmick they do. Many people started to move. The other thing is the coverage is very important. As I mentioned in my video, where we have a like Tokyo versus rural area, the subscription percentage is about half. As we grow our coverage, and we have done it, but we need to enhance it, I think the subscription number is gonna just keep growing that because that's the most important thing, and we have been waiting for this. You have to remember we just started two years ago, and I don't think there's anybody who build this network like this speed, and we're gonna keep doing it. We're gonna have as good coverage as our competitors in the near future. Who is much more simpler? Who is fair? Obviously, they will try to disturb us and try to kind of come up with a funky plan, which is trying to kind of mislead the consumer, in my opinion. I think our price is very competitive. Plus, you know, our ecosystem contribution is huge. We also are planning to. Because since we're providing like free calls and so forth, we are gonna provide more like personalized offers, personalized advertisement to the consumer to improve ARPU. Our ARPU is going up very rapidly. ARPU and also the customer subscription. We have been providing this kind of one year free and then three months free, but we stopped three months free. From the month zero, now the subscriber, if they use more than one gigabyte, they need to pay. I think that people started to realize this, so I am very, very confident about this. We also started to use all these techniques we use to accelerate the acquisition of Rakuten Card membership. Like, you know, integrating into Rakuten basket, you know, for example, selling iPhones on Rakuten marketplace and try to follow up with our MNO service and so forth. That's going extremely well as well. We're gonna also enhance the synergy in terms of member subscribers acquisition through our ecosystem further. You're saying, Mickey, that you don't need to come up with any more aggressive marketing plans in order to increase the number of new subscribers per month. You know, it's not definite, right? I think if you just say then our competitor may do something very, very strange. I'm not saying that it's not gonna be different. But at this point, we wanna have more paid customer, just than the pure number is not that important, right? I think our goal is to break even and in the future make huge amount of profit from this. If you think about the fact that we get to like 50 million, 20 million, we are talking about billions of dollars, you know, not one, two, more than that of the profit. That's what my vision is. We are carefully monitoring who are profitable, who are not profitable. That's what we are going to do. Okay, great. Thank you. Let me move on to my second question, which is about the fintech business. As you explained to me the last time, you are focusing on growing the number of customers, the number of credit cards issued, the number of bank accounts, and then the amount of charges per credit card. All these are generating great numbers right now, and they are much higher than the revenue and operating profit growth. When do you think the revenue and profit growth, operating profit growth, will start catching up with the number of subscriber growth, et cetera? Well, couple of things. Obviously customer acquisition cost is very, very expensive. Yes. Right? Our customer acquisition is much lower than our competitors. Yet the speed of customer acquisition is so rapid. Like, we have caught up with standalone SBI for number of accounts already. We are bigger than standalone SBI. If they were consolidated, they changed their reporting numbers to the consolidated basis, then we are number two, but we're gonna catch up with them probably this year. If you think about this, then the acquisition cost, customer acquisition, once we slow down customer acquisition, it is going to be unbelievably profitable. As far as we can grow, we do not wanna sacrifice. We wanna dominate personal finance business, and we can. I think now at this point, we're gonna balance the pro w hich is what we are doing right now. We can grow more faster, more aggressively, but we are kind of managing it. I don't know whether that's a good thing or not, but I think the financial market is somehow, you know, not really super long-term oriented. That's what we're working on. The other thing is that we have been a little bit too generous about giving out the points, like for example, Rakuten Securities and so forth. Some of the customers are not really profitable for us and what we have started to do is analyzing one customer by one customer and think about, you know, what is our best point strategy for them. Like, our asset management has led to, you know, several trillion JPY. The points cost was significant. We changed that. That's gonna give us full year like JPY 7 billion-JPY 8 billion of profit, simply speaking. As easy as that. For Rakuten Bank, because of the not enough equity, to be very honest, it was very difficult to have the asset-liability management strategy to allocate, you know, certain proper amount to based on the risk profile of each asset. Now, Rakuten Bank created a new growth strategy to double the profit, which I think is doing very, very well. Rakuten Card definitely obviously is definitely the cashing and the revolving credit was a little bit slow because of people buying online, but they do not really did a lot of offline real shopping. Once this pandemic is gone, I think it is gonna start growing again. We are kind of revisiting our point strategy too. I hope I answered to your question. No, thank you, Mickey. My last question is, you talked about e-commerce penetration being low in Japan. You said it's only 7%-9% versus the U.S. at 20%, Europe at 20%, China at 40%. When do you think Japan will catch up? You know, let's say doubling from the current penetration of about 8% to 16%-20%. Because a doubling in 3 years would mean a 24% growth rate for your Ichiba business. How long do you think it will take for Japan to double its e-commerce penetration? Well, I think there will be some kind of a magic number that people will consider buying online is their kinda main line. I think the reason why we are pushing this grocery shopping, you know, Rakuten Seiyu Netsuper, is that this is something they will buy, you know, periodically, not occasionally, right? Kind of as a daily basis. You know, I'm not a fortune teller, so I cannot tell when. But definitely the curve is not going to be as steep as it was in China or in the U.S. because the real shopping platform or infrastructure in Japan, compared with other countries, convenience store, department store, specialized store, is really good. Having said that, as the more you have shopping, it is going to be very difficult for the physical stores to sustain their operation. I think there will be a price advantage for online shopping in the as we go on. I hope by 2030. Our goal is to reach JPY 10 trillion. The commitment is 2030, but I hope we can achieve it earlier. We are talking about, I do not know how much percentage growth, but not so explosive growth, because if you talk about 8 years from now and doubling it is not impossible. Yeah. I think, I hope as the network speed accelerated, now close to 80%-90% of shopping is coming from smartphones. The faster the network becomes, it is gonna be more, much more present to buy stuff, right? Doubling in 8 years' time would mean about 9% growth. That would not be. I'm sure you can do better than that. Thanks very much, Mickey, for answering my questions. Yeah. Bye-bye. Bye. Thank you very much. Our time is up. This concludes the questions from investors and analysts. Last but not least, Mikitani-san, could you say something for wrapping up? Thank you very much for joining our call today. We had video and also Q&A session. During that session, I think you understand how we are progressing well. From the past, people say many things to our company, going back to the original, "Why are you doing the travel? Or why are you going to the finance? Why are you globalizing? And why are you expanding business to overseas market?" From mid to long-term point of view, we have to compete in the global market. Unless otherwise, profitability here in Japan would become really challenging. We are executing on, for that purpose in mobile, and we, their technology is great. Well, it's not well understood here in Japan, which is a pity, but the potential of the revenue from this business is really high. Rakuten Mobile, 20 million, 25 million is not impossible. I am fully confident with that. We can expect huge synergy, and then we can have richer data with that. Given that Rakuten's potential is great, and today from Hirose-san talked about the difference in the valuation. We need to explain it very carefully and in detail to investors, analysts, and media. Please stay tuned with us, and we have a great potential for growth. We have diversified business portfolio, and then it has a uniformity, and then this is quite unique to us. Thank you very much. This concludes Rakuten Group 2021 full year and fourth quarter financial results meeting. Thank you very much for your participation.