Rakuten Mobile touted strong progress in building out its unique disaggregated network, but that progress has come at a high cost and the Japanese carrier is now looking to lean out its operations by shuffling jobs and costs through other parts of its vast organizational structure.

The company reported that its Rakuten Mobile division posted $864 million in losses for the third quarter of this year. This was a bit less than what it had reported the previous quarter, but pushed its losses to date for this year to more than $2.3 billion.

Rakuten’s management noted the losses were tied to the ongoing expansion of its cloud-based open radio access network (RAN) architecture that has allowed the nascent operator to cover 98% of Japan’s population with its own network. That on-network coverage is important as it allows Rakuten Mobile to reduce the roaming costs it pays to rival operators when Rakuten Mobile customers are not on its home network.

The carrier also used that coverage mark as a signal to start shifting its aggressive network investments to be “lean and profitable.” Rakuten Mobile and Rakuten Symphony CEO Tareq Amin shied away from calling these job cuts and explained that this shift would result in moving employees into other areas of the broader Rakuten business.

“As we are nearing the end of the major construction build out, I would not classify this as Rakuten Mobile is doing layoffs, but Rakuten Mobile is now focused on our lean operation,” Amin said during the earnings call in regards to a question about whether this move would lead to layoffs at the company. “The staff that we would have required to continue the build and investment into the build, obviously as the number of base station reduces, such staff we are transferring to other functions within the group.”

The carrier counts more than 50,000 of its own base stations, with plans to grow that to 60,000 total base stations. Just under 6,500 of those base stations are currently beaming a 5G signal, with the rest focused solely on 4G LTE.

Amin also touted the carrier’s plan to begin using Japan’s so-called “platinum band” spectrum in the 900 MHz band to help it expand coverage. The exec noted that spectrum was still being cleared and that Rakuten Mobile would begin deploying those assets beginning in early 2024.

Rakuten last year was awarded 20 megahertz of spectrum in the 1.7 GHz band that was previously reserved for the country’s military. The carrier also controls spectrum in the 3.7 GHz, 4.5 GHz, and 28 GHz bands.

Despite its consumer-facing operational challenges, Rakuten’s Symphony platform is gaining momentum. Amin explained that the year-old platform counted 14 current customers, has generated $315 million in sales, and is sitting on a $3.1 billion booking pipeline.

“We think in the next five quarters we're going to work and really put all of our energy and effort to break through that billion-dollar target mark for revenue for Symphony,” Amin said.

Rakuten formed its Symphony division last year with a focus on expanding its open RAN architecture into more networks around the world. The division initially housed the Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP) and Rakuten’s various open RAN technology assets and services.

The RCP platform earlier this year was rebranded as Symworld following its acquisition of Robin.io. The company at that time also inked deals with AT&T, Cisco, Nokia, and Qualcomm.

Rakuten more recently signed a deal to host that all-encompassing cloud-native telecom platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS), added a new edge-focused component to the platform with plans to use those capabilities on its home network in Japan, and signed a deal with Juniper to be the exclusive RAN intelligent controller (RIC) provider through the Symphony platform.