Rakuten's big shopping plans for Singapore

[SINGAPORE] Rakuten Inc might have bought local start-up Viki for an estimated US$200 million, but now it is Singapore's turn to buy things from it.

Japan's largest online retail store has big plans for the local version of its online shopping site - also named Rakuten - that it launched in January, according to its CEO, Hiroshi Mikitani.

"As we scale, we need to have more products on our (local) website. We need to improve brand awareness, we need to increase our membership base dramatically," Mr Mikitani told The Business Times last week.