September 24, 2004Application for Membership into Nippon Professional Baseball
On September 24, 2004, Rakuten, Inc. announced that the company has submitted an application for membership into Nippon Professional Baseball to establish a baseball club. The baseball club will be named Rakuten Baseball, Inc. and is scheduled to begin operations in October 2004 in Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture. The baseball club will be capitalized at 400 million yen. The representative director will be Hiroshi Mikitani. The directors will be Hiroshi Mikitani, Takashi Yoshida, Takahiro Shinozaki, and Jun Yoneda. (For full release, please refer to Japanese IR release.)