Rakuten To Close Several South East Asian Sites

The Japanese ecommerce company Rakuten has announced that it will be closing down its Indonesian, Malaysian and Singaporean ecommerce sites by March. It will also be selling off the Thai ecommerce site Tarad. It is rumoured that it will be replacing these sites with a consumer-to-consumer ecommerce app called Rakuma. South East Asia has a rapidly rising mobile internet population, facilitated by the rise of affordable smartphones in the region. It is this affinity to mobile internet use that seems to be driving Rakuten to abandon its websites and use an app-only approach instead in the region. 
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