Hiroshi Mikitani: the visionary who built Japan’s Amazon

Hiroshi Mikitani’s talent for trend-spotting has already made him a billionaire. Now he has his sights firmly set on a new challenge. Jane Lewis reports.

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Hiroshi Mikitani: a trailblazer
(Image credit: © 2019 Bloomberg Finance LP)

This year is shaping up to be a big one for Hiroshi "Mickey" Mikitani, the flamboyant billionaire behind Japan's largest e-commerce outfit, Rakuten.Long renowned as a talented trend-spotter, several of his long-term bets are coming to fruition at the same time. So far, so lucrative. As Reuters notes, Rakuten's shares are up 38% this year "on rising investor expectations of returns on its technology investments", which in turn has propelled Mikitani's personal wealth to around $6bn.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.