From a telecom perspective, Japan's Rakuten has two guises. One is a technology pioneer that dazzles the industry and its analysts, promising to revolutionize a moribund sector with an array of software goodies and bright young employees. The other is a financial catastrophe, having lost billions of dollars on its rollout of a mobile network that has failed to grab market share in Japan.

Rakuten's job next year is to stem those losses once and for all and prove that its technology choices make sense – both inside Japan and internationally.

On the domestic front, the main challenge is for Rakuten to attract customers from its bigger rivals, which it has struggled to do so far. In its role as a vendor, it needs to overcome doubts about the economic feasibility of building and maintaining software-based multivendor networks.

Unlike most prospective customers, Rakuten has no technology legacy, and it owns the software it has deployed in Japan. If it is struggling with margins, what hope is there for a brownfield operator that must pay Rakuten for software?

That is among several big, unresolved questions for the company on the eve of 2023. In the meantime, here is a selection of our Rakuten stories from 2022.

Figure 1:
(Source: PriceMinister on Flickr CC2.0)

1/11/22 - Spectrum-starved Rakuten will be loss-making until 2026 – analysts
(Iain Morris, International Editor)

2/14/22 - With $3B in bookings, Rakuten Symphony makes big app store pitch
(Iain Morris, International Editor)

2/14/22 - Rakuten says losses to shrink, eyeing 10,000-site 5G rollout in 2022
(Iain Morris, International Editor)

2/25/22 - Rakuten Mobile names Amin CEO amid warning of $4.7B funding gap
(Iain Morris, International Editor)

2/28/22 - Rakuten adds Robin.io, AT&T tech into Symphony
(Mike Dano, Editorial Director, 5G & Mobile Strategies)

3/9/22 - Rakuten Mobile's new boss sets out 'fast-paced' growth plan
(Iain Morris, International Editor)

3/14/22 - Rakuten's Amin targets 25% of RAN market in bid to unseat giants
(Iain Morris, International Editor)

5/13/22 - Rakuten Mobile hits peak loss as it charts path to profit in 2023
(Iain Morris, International Editor)

5/16/22 - Rakuten is dumping Red Hat's OpenStack for its own cloud tech
(Iain Morris, International Editor)

5/24/22 - Rakuten Mobile's hiring freeze is ominous
(Iain Morris, International Editor)

7/5/22 - Rakuten takes aim at VMware, and it's not the only threat
(Iain Morris, International Editor)

7/22/22 - Japan's Rakuten announces innovation lab in India
(Gagandeep Kaur, Contributing Editor)

8/10/22 - Rakuten Mobile loss narrows as 340K customers quit
(Iain Morris, International Editor)

8/11/22 - Rakuten outs Cisco, Mavenir, NEC as 1&1 suppliers
(Iain Morris, International Editor)

9/20/22 - Jio follows Rakuten into vendor role as telco sector grows older
(Iain Morris, International Editor)

9/30/22 - Rakuten Mobile's Tareq Amin: Symware celebration
(Phil Harvey, Editor-in-Chief)

11/11/22 - Rakuten Mobile turnaround cannot happen fast enough
(Iain Morris, International Editor)