TOKYO -- In early March, Rakuten executives Hiroshi Mikitani and Tareq Amin returned to Barcelona, the site of their fateful first meeting. On the sidelines of the Mobile World Congress in 2018, Amin, then an executive at Indian telecom Reliance Jio, had sold Rakuten founder Mikitani on the idea of building Japan's fourth mobile network and using a then-untested technology to do it.
"I told Mickey that this was a very risky approach," Amin, now chief technology officer of Rakuten Mobile, told Nikkei Asia in an interview. "If we want to disrupt, we will need to do things differently."
