Amazon.com, Inc. vs Rakuten: Strategic Comparison

This in-depth comparison examines Amazon.com, Inc. and Rakuten across revenue, market value, business model, competitive positioning, and long-term growth strategy. Whether you are researching Amazon.com, Inc. on its own, evaluating Rakuten, or weighing the two companies side by side, the breakdown below highlights where each company leads and where the gap between Amazon.com, Inc. and Rakuten is widest.

On the headline numbers, annual revenue is $716.9B (FY2025) for Amazon.com, Inc. and ~$16.7B (FY2025) for Rakuten, while their respective market capitalizations stand at $2.69T and $9.8B. Amazon.com, Inc. is headquartered in United States and Rakuten in Japan, and those different home markets shape how each company competes.

Amazon.com, Inc.: Amazon started as an online bookstore in 1994 and now runs four businesses of real scale: the world's largest e-commerce marketplace, a logistics network that carries most of its own parcels, AWS, and a $68.6B advertising operation. It also owns Whole Foods Market, Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, One Medical, and Amazon Leo, its low Earth orbit satellite network. The company reads more like infrastructure than retail: other businesses run on AWS, sell through its marketplace, ship through its fulfillment network, and buy its ads. The company is headquartered in Seattle, Washington. The legendary "everything store" notoriously began in a small garage in Bellevue, Washington as a simple online bookseller before aggressively expanding into retail, cloud computing, and global logistics.

Rakuten: Rakuten is one of Japan's largest digital platforms and is often compared with Amazon, though its model is closer to a marketplace plus a financial group. It runs Rakuten Ichiba, one of Japan's top two e-commerce marketplaces with Amazon Japan, a leading credit card issuer, Japan's largest online bank by accounts, a top online brokerage, and Rakuten Mobile, the country's newest network operator. Rakuten Points connect these services, and overseas the group owns Rakuten Rewards, Kobo and Viber. The company is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan.

Amazon.com, Inc. and Rakuten pursue distinct approaches to generating revenue, and understanding how each company operates is the foundation of any fair comparison between Amazon.com, Inc. and Rakuten.

Amazon.com, Inc. business model: Amazon runs a hybrid model: it buys inventory and sells it directly, and it rents its store, warehouses, and ad inventory to independent sellers. In FY2025 online stores produced $269.3B of net sales, third-party seller services $172.2B, advertising services $68.6B, subscription services $49.6B, physical stores $22.6B, and AWS $128.7B. Marketplace referral commissions typically run in the mid-teens as a share of the sale price, and sellers pay separately for Fulfillment by Amazon and for advertising placement. Retail earns thin margins but collects cash from customers before it pays suppliers, which funds expansion without borrowing. Profit sits in AWS, which turned $128.7B of net sales into $45.6B of operating income, and in advertising, where Amazon charges for placement against shopping queries.

Rakuten business model: Rakuten makes money from three segments tied together by one Rakuten ID and Rakuten Points. Internet Services (Rakuten Ichiba, Rakuten Travel, Rakuten Rewards, Kobo) earns merchant fees, commissions and advertising, since Ichiba is a marketplace where independent shops run their own storefronts rather than a first-party retailer. FinTech (Rakuten Card, Rakuten Bank, Rakuten Securities, Rakuten Payment, insurance) earns interchange, revolving-credit interest, deposit spreads and brokerage fees. Mobile (Rakuten Mobile and Rakuten Symphony) earns monthly subscription revenue and telecom software fees. Customers who use more Rakuten services earn more points through the Super Point Up (SPU) program, which lowers churn and acquisition costs across the group.

The durability of a company's moat often decides long-term winners. Here is how the competitive advantages of Amazon.com, Inc. stack up against those of Rakuten.

Amazon.com, Inc. competitive advantage: Amazon's advantages depend on scale rather than patents. It carried $534.1B of gross property and equipment at the end of FY2025, including $155.1B of land and buildings and $172.5B of servers and networking equipment, which pays for delivery speed and cloud capacity smaller rivals cannot fund. Prime, priced at $139 a year in the US, changes buying behavior by making each additional order feel free once the fee is paid, and Amazon delivered more than 13 billion items same day or next day in 2025. AWS holds the largest share of global cloud infrastructure spending, about 28% in the fourth quarter of 2025 according to Synergy Research, and customers face real migration cost once applications are built on AWS-specific services. Advertising is the hardest piece to copy, because the ads run against queries from shoppers who are already at the checkout.

Rakuten competitive advantage: Rakuten's main edge is cross-use. A single Rakuten ID links shopping, card, bank, brokerage and mobile accounts, and the SPU program raises point rewards for customers who use several services. That base is large: Rakuten Bank had 18.46 million accounts and Rakuten Securities 14.39 million accounts in Q2 2026, and Rakuten Card shopping volume reached ~$186 billion (¥27.7 trillion) over the trailing twelve months. Few Japanese rivals combine a top marketplace, card issuer, bank and brokerage under one loyalty currency.

Future prospects matter as much as current results. The growth strategies below explain how Amazon.com, Inc. and Rakuten each plan to expand from here.

Amazon.com, Inc. growth strategy: Amazon's growth now comes mostly from the higher-margin layers on top of its infrastructure. Advertising services grew from $56.2B in FY2024 to $68.6B in FY2025 as Amazon added inventory in Prime Video, grocery, and its demand-side platform. In AWS the company is spending on its own silicon and capacity: the Project Rainier cluster of roughly 500,000 Trainium2 chips, built with Anthropic, became fully operational in October 2025, and Amazon had put $8.0B into Anthropic convertible notes by the end of 2025. Retail growth is being pushed through grocery, pharmacy, and same-day delivery rather than new categories, and Amazon Leo, the satellite network previously called Project Kuiper, is being aimed at commercial connectivity contracts.

Rakuten growth strategy: Rakuten's growth strategy rests on three moves: push Rakuten Mobile toward sustained profitability by adding subscribers who also use other Rakuten services; deepen FinTech by consolidating card, bank and securities under Rakuten Bank to cut funding costs and cross-sell deposits in a rising-rate Japan; and apply AI across Ichiba search, recommendations and merchant tools to lift gross merchandise sales. Earlier, Rakuten raised capital through the 2023 Rakuten Bank IPO and by selling minority stakes in Rakuten Securities to Mizuho, which helped fund the mobile build-out.

A closer look at the financial trajectory of Amazon.com, Inc. and Rakuten rounds out the comparison.

Amazon.com, Inc.: Amazon's headline revenue understates how concentrated its profit is. FY2025 net sales were $716.9B and operating income was $80.0B, of which AWS supplied $45.6B on $128.7B of sales. The North America segment turned $426.3B of sales into $29.6B of operating income, and International turned $161.9B into $4.8B. Advertising services, which Amazon reports inside the retail segments, grew from $56.2B in FY2024 to $68.6B in FY2025. Operating cash flow was $139.5B; $128.3B of net cash capital expenditures left $11.2B of free cash flow, down from $38.2B a year earlier. Amazon says most technology-infrastructure spending supports AWS, while fulfillment capacity also requires investment. See its FY2025 Form 10-K for the segment and cash-flow reconciliations.

Rakuten: Rakuten's results for most of the 2020s were shaped by one decision: building Japan's fourth mobile network from 2018 onward. Net losses reached ~$2.5 billion (¥372.9 billion) in FY2022 and ~$2.27 billion (¥339.5 billion) in FY2023 while revenue kept growing. Losses narrowed to ~$1.09 billion (¥162.4 billion) in FY2024 and about $1.19 billion (¥177.9 billion) in FY2025 on revenue of ~$16.8 billion (¥2.50 trillion). The turn came in Q2 2026: revenue of ~$4.46 billion (¥665.5 billion) (+11.6%), EBITDA of ~$773 million (¥115.3 billion) and net income of ~$182 million (¥27.2 billion), the first quarterly profit since Q2 2020, with management targeting a full-year profit for 2026. Rakuten Group, Inc. is a massive Japanese electronic commerce and online retailing company, operating a highly diverse global ecosystem with a market valuation generally exceeding $10 billion.