Rakuten’s foray into mobile network infrastructure continues to be a costly affair that culminated in a $1.02 billion operating loss for its mobile network business in Japan during the fourth quarter of 2021. 

The conglomerate isn’t out of the weeds yet, as it still faces significant costs, but executives claim the financial performance of Rakuten Mobile will improve starting in the second quarter of 2022. Executives previously said the operator isn’t expected to turn a profit until 2023. 

The continued trendline on losses is astounding by any measure. Total year-over-year losses in Rakuten’s mobile segment jumped 55% from the year-ago period, and losses increased almost 13% from the previous quarter.

The company’s mobile unit reported a loss of $1.027 billion on $565 million in revenue during Q4. Revenue was up nearly 48% year over year.

The figures illustrate the major expense Rakuten took on in building its own network in Japan, coupled with the tough competition it continues to face in a country that already enjoys some of the best mobile networks in the world.

Rakuten Mobile earlier this month reached 96% population coverage for its 4G LTE network with 200,000 sites deployed nationwide, but it remains in the early stages of 5G deployment, a nagging delay that undercuts its overall message. Rakuten Mobile remains the only major network in the world running on pure open radio access network (RAN) architecture, but that unique attribute isn’t yet translating to profit or significant market share gains. 

Indeed, Rakuten specifically pointed to non-recurring operational investment in its mobile and logistics businesses to explain a companywide operating loss of nearly $1.95 billion during Q4. Excluding those businesses, Rakuten claims it would have banked $1.6 billion in operating income.

No wonder Rakuten’s mobile aspirations extend well beyond Japan’s border. Indeed, the company is eyeing a much larger business on the expansion of Rakuten Symphony. Rakuten founder and CEO Hiroshi Mikitani previously claimed the total addressable market for Rakuten Symphony could be as high as $150 billion in 2025.

The company took multiple steps toward that goal this week by revealing an automated, one-touch platform that aims to deliver unified cloud and network functions for the RAN, core, and edge. Symworld sits under Rakuten Symphony, which formally became a standalone business in October 2021. 

Symworld represents a rebranding effort and a repacking of the Rakuten Communications Platform, which includes the recently acquired Altiostar and Rakuten’s various open RAN technology assets and services. It’s a collection of the same tools and functions Rakuten used to build and operate its network in Japan that it’s now selling as a service to other operators. 

Rakuten’s pitch — making a RAN intelligent controller, open RAN functions and services, security, service assurance, and operations and business support services available as a platform — could certainly gain traction among carriers that want to pursue open RAN without the challenge of purchasing and integrating individual products and services. 

The company’s largest customer to date comes in the form of another greenfield operator, Germany’s 1&1 Drillisch, which inked a deal with Rakuten to build a 5G open RAN. Rakuten Symphony claims it can help operators shorten site commissioning times from weeks to minutes, delivering a 40% lower capex, decrease network opex by 30% compared to traditional frameworks, and introduce new features at least 10 times faster.

“The platform can modernize any network and move operations from being coordinated by people and paper to being driven by software and data. And it’s about time,” Rakuten Symphony CEO Tareq Amin wrote in a blog post.

“The successful cloud providers use their own services first then sell them to others. Rakuten Symphony is the first telecom company to do the same in the cloud-native era and as we have seen that the possible outcomes are transformational,” he added. 

The company also announced a series of geographical expansion moves, bringing its operations to Britain, France, and Germany. The on-the-ground expansion brings Rakuten Symphony’s total footprint to Japan, the U.S., Singapore, India, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

Rakuten Symphony said it plans to demonstrate the capabilities of Symworld in a couple weeks at MWC Barcelona.