On 9th August, Rakuten Group provided a readout on its Q2 results, with more detailed drilldowns on Rakuten Mobile and Rakuten Symphony, presented by joint CEO Tareq Amin. It has been a year since the formation of Symphony, Rakuten’s vehicle to take the innovations, approaches and technology behind the world’s largest and most successful cloud-based open RAN network to the world. From this latest briefing, it is clear that both Rakuten Mobile and Rakuten Symphony are perhaps reaching, to borrow Churchill’s famous phrase, “the end of the beginning”. The phase of high capex is coming to a close. Free service plans are coming to an end – resulting in a greater proportion of data-hungry users (who get much better cost/GB on Rakuten Mobile than rivals). And Rakuten is still only in the early stages of exploring the synergies and affinities between mobile and other digital services offered across the Group. Yet the mission and driving principles behind the Rakuten Mobile & Symphony story remain unchanged. And for all our industry’s obsession with new technology, Amin returned repeatedly to the simplicity of Rakuten’s vision for telecom: make it (significantly!) cheaper, make it better, make it automated. That vision underpins both Rakuten […]