A139 Rakuten Inc., was founded in 1997 by Hiroshi Mikitani, who used to work for the Industrial Bank of Japan Ltd. (now Mizuho Financial Group, Inc.). It grew rapidly through the online shop, Rakuten Ichiba. At that time, setting up a site to sell local specialty produce or your own company's products through the Internet was extremely difficult. And, even if one managed to set up a site, So Rakuten offered a simple mechanism, that did not require specific technical skills, to conduct e-commerce on the Internet and was consequently taken up by many Internet retailers who joined Rakuten Ichiba. As the number of retailers increased, so also did purchasing customers and the site's reputation grew by word of mouth. In September 2007, there were 58,000 companies participating in Rakuten Ichiba with some 18 million products for sale.