Rakuten CEO touts Viber’s ability to counter Russian ‘fake news’ during Kyiv visit By Reuters

By Max Hunder

KYIV (Reuters) – Hiroshi Mikitani, the founder and chief government of Rakuten Group (4755.T), on Saturday touted the flexibility of his firm’s Viber messaging platform to counter Russian propaganda.

“Not like different social media, we have made it crystal clear we will block all these faux information and propaganda of Russia,” Mikitani informed Reuters in a Zoom (NASDAQ:) interview throughout a go to to Kyiv.

The 58-year outdated was talking after assembly senior Ukrainian officers earlier within the day as a part of a gaggle of Japanese enterprise leaders accompanying Japan’s Overseas Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi on a go to to Ukraine’s capital.

“We met virtually all ministers and they’re constructing a future technique… they’ve a macro-economic progress technique, and I’m very inspired and impressed,” he stated.

Viber, which launched in 2010 and was acquired by Rakuten in 2014, has a 98% market penetration fee in Ukraine. It’s also well-liked in Russia.

Requested if the app had confronted makes an attempt to breach it by Russia, he stated there had not been any breaches.

“We’ve by no means been breached by Russia previously. Generally, manner earlier than the conflict, we had requests, which we rejected… we do not need any safety considerations.”

Mikitani didn’t elaborate on what was requested or by whom, however stated that Viber has by no means given any data to any authorities.

The billionaire entrepreneur has beforehand been vocal in his help for Ukraine and made a 1 billion yen ($6.77 million) donation to its authorities initially of the invasion.

Rakuten has introduced plans to work with Ukraine’s largest cell operator, Kyivstar, to offer Open Radio Entry Community (Open RAN) telecommunications know-how that makes use of software program to run community features on the cloud, one thing Mikitani has touted as a know-how of the longer term.

“All this hardware-based know-how is the know-how of perhaps 2010,” he stated. “Software program goes to be rather more environment friendly, whole value of operation will go down perhaps 30% to 50%.”

($1 = 147.8100 yen)