Rakuten launches fashion-sharing website in Taiwan

July 4, 2013 Leave a comment

Rakuten launches fashion-sharing website in Taiwan

CNA

2013-07-04

Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten launched a social networking site for sharing fashion information in Taiwan Wednesday to grab a bigger share of the country’s growing online shopping market. Toru Shimada, CEO and chairman of Rakuten Asia, said his company is hoping to attract at least 1 million members in the coming year to the new site called “OSHa’Re,” which means fashion in Japanese. “Taiwan is Rakuten’s global market benchmark for new innovative technologies and services,” Shimada said at a press briefing on the new service, which has visual search technology that allows users to match photos of items they want with goods offered by Rakuten’s online shopping mall. “We are confident that OSHa’Re will become the No. 1 fashion website in Taiwan,” he said. Taiwan became in 2008 the first overseas market in which Rakuten established a presence, and the Japanese online retailer has since expanded its operations to Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia. In the past two years, Rakuten has acquired or bought stakes in companies in the United States, France, Brazil, Germany, Canada and the United Kingdom. The global e-commerce market has grown by an average of 19% per year since 2010 and is expected to reach US$1 trillion in turnover this year, according to the Taiwan External Trade Development Council, the country’s main trade promotion body. In Taiwan alone, e-commerce turnover is expected to exceed NT$1 trillion (US$33.3 billion) in 2015, the council estimated.

 

Filed under TMT Trends

About bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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