Rakuten launches online shop for the super-rich

It's not every day you see the figure "Y136,500,000" with a button underneath it saying "add to shopping cart".

Internet auction/shopping site Rakuten, which is rapidly approaching conglomerate status after acquiring a brokerage firm, travel agency and baseball team, announced yesterday that it's to expand its shopping site into luxury products aimed at the very rich, the stated target being those with financial assets worth over $1 mn excluding their homes. The initial offering is 24 products that include a gem-encrusted Patek Phillipe watch costing the aforementioned Y136,500,000 (US$1.2 mn), along with more reasonable offerings such as $100,000 bonsai trees or a set of 56 bottles of Chateau Mouton Rothschild, one for each year from 1945 to 2000, for a positively knockdown $250,000. Rakuten notes that while products costing over Y1 mn still account for less than 1% of its sales by volume, the second quarter of fiscal 2005 saw these sales grow 63.7% year on year (they don't offer the absolute values, but we're assuming very low volumes as yet). President Mikitani threw out the comment that friends of his in the sports and entertainment industry used Rakuten to shop because they were unable to go out to shops (Mikitani, like livedoor's Takafumi Horie and many other IT business leaders here, has a soft spot for celebrity).

All of which leaves us feeling the return of the Bubble ever closer.

[Link: Rakuten's luxury market (Japanese)]

[Via Ascii 24 (Japanese)]