J-Cast News reported, on 13 June, that Japan’s Rakuten shopping portal would shut down its e-commerce site based in Cambridge, England. The announcement also said that the firm would terminate its operations in Barcelona, Spain, and Vienna, Austria, by the end of August.
The decision comes on the heels of an announcement in February 2016 that the Tokyo-based Rakuten, Inc.—a shopping portal founded in 1997 and with revenues last year of ¥713.5bn—would close its marketplaces in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.
With an eye on growth prospects, Rakuten has made the decision to focus on France and Germany for European investment, because “businesses there have the scale and potential for sustainable growth”.
Rakuten acquired the UK site play.com for £25mn in 2011, restarting it as Rakuten.co.uk in 2014. The reason for the decision to terminate UK operations is, allegedly, that the cost of growth relative to the size of the businesses could not be justified.
The article noted—somewhat with irony—that, while Rakuten may be shutting down its UK operations, English would remain the in-house lingua franca throughout the organisation.