Good afternoon, and thank you for joining Rakuten Group's 2024 second quarter financial results meeting. We have disclosed the latest consolidated financial reports at 3 A.M. today. You can view this data on our corporate website's page for investors, along with the presentation documents used in this meeting. If your voice is cut, and then please, you can use the different IC software. Now, Mikitani, Mr. Mikitani will give you a presentation. Mikitani-san, please go ahead.
Good afternoon, everyone. Some hot days are continuing, and 2024 Q2 financial results meeting is held today. And first of all, today, so I'm sure you are paying attention on here, Rakuten Mobile. So looking at the total subscribers, 7.7 million, and then MNO plus MVNO, and it's 7.26 million, and this is as of August 7th data. And then, looking at the subscribers number of this Q2, and the B2C subscribers are increasing drastically, and then this is one area that you have to pay attention. So the Rakuten Mobile non-consolidated pre-marketing cash flow, this is before marketing means acquiring customers or retain customers, and the marketing costs related to that. If we exclude that marketing-related cost, and then in Q2, Rakuten Mobile non-consolidated basis, pre-marketing cash flow achieved profit.
So this is more detailed information with chart. As you can see, this graph started from 2022, and then this was quite challenging and exciting Rakuten Mobile project that we kicked off. And Rakuten Mobile's contribution to the entire, the Rakuten Group, Rakuten Ichiba or Rakuten Travel and Rakuten Card. And then given that entire group, so at the group level, I mean, the cash flow already turned into positive. So this, project itself, looking from the entire group perspective, it's already, turned into a positive from cash flow perspective, and I think you can read it from this chart. And then, let me talk about the Q2 highlight. First, on a consolidated basis, the revenue is shown here, against, last year, year-on-year, 8.1%+.
So the record high, JPY 537.3 billion, was the consolidated revenue. The internet segment and also overseas EC, or international, EC and contents basis, have been expanded and contributed to revenue growth. In the Fintech segment, each of the services or the segments are doing well. The mobile segment, we have subscribers increase, and so boosted revenue by JPY 15.6 billion year-on-year. Now, looking at the operating income, dramatic improvement. So improvement of JPY 27.6 billion year-on-year. It was minus JPY 11.8 billion, but EBITDA, we actually had JPY 66.8 billion in EBITDA.
Also, Non-Fintech posted EBITDA profit of JPY 9.9 billion as well. As for the financial situation in the first half, because of the foreign bonds being issued, the liquidity gap until 2025 has all been addressed. We will explain this later, but finance lease fundraising of Rakuten Mobile has been announced. With this funding, self-funding in the mobile business is already established. Therefore, with this, going forward, internet services, in other words, shopping and travel or fintech businesses, generated cash or cash flow can be used to reduce the interest-bearing debt at Rakuten Group Incorporated. So you can see, there's a tremendous improvement in the financial situation as well.
So this is by segment business update and the internet segment. First of all, internet service segment. The revenue was JPY 303.9 billion, and then this is the +3.1% Y-o-Y basis, and then the operating income, which was increased by 30.3% Y-o-Y, which is JPY 18.9 billion. And this is because the SPU revision was made, and also, there were SPU improvements, and then we are implementing the measures to our heavy users. With that, the domestic EC revenue growth rate and revenue went up, and also the profitability recovered because of these measures. On the other hand, minority investment... so there is a valuation loss that happened last year, so that portion was shrunk drastically.
And then looking into detail of this business segment, first of all, EC business. So there are many changes, or also the Nationwide Travel Support happened last year, and that does not happen this year. So these various conditions, if we annualize them, and then comparing to the year before, plus 3.1%. So the fundamental became strong. And then also the good transaction and on the good customers, we are dealing our businesses with good customers. And then Rakuten Travel and domestic hotel checkout GTV is plus 34%, Y-o-Y, for 34% comparing to the FY 2019. So this is comparing to the pre-COVID. And then as for the advertising business, plus 8.4% growth.
Then looking at the overseas businesses, first of all, Rakuten TV, number of users is 112.1 million, and +44.2% Y-o-Y. Rakuten Kobo also really making a profit, and the users' registration is 66.6 million, which is +6.2% Y-o-Y. And Viber, this is also making profit. The number of users, 1.5 billion, +5.3% Y-o-Y. And Viki, this is also profitable business, and then about 90 million users are using this service. So the overseas businesses overall, we are performing pretty well. And looking at the domestic EC, I mentioned some one time factor, and if we exclude those one time, we mentioned, it was increased by +3.8%.
So if we exclude them, one-off condition, then we have grown by 25%, as you can see from this chart. Next, as for the GMS, it's steadily recovering. Last year, we did the SPU 0.5 revision. There are some impact of these revisions, but the total Ichiba GMS remained steady. So for Q3, last year we had the consumption tax revision, the last-minute demand happened. So how will it be impacting into this Q3 is something we need to worry. And then for overseas businesses, overall, it's steadily growing, and then making a big profit out of this business. Last but not least, internet service-related topic here.
As you know, so Rakuten Group, thinking of the empowerment of the local government, and these are that hometown tax, so that we can contribute to the regional and the community growth. And then we are actively working on to support regional economy increase, and then points were burdened on our company, and then grant them to our users, but from MIC. So, they made this notice. And, they did not obtain our consensus, but they, they went an announcement of this, and then about 2 million people signed about this petition. And then we will ask to revoke this notice strongly.
Fintech segment. So, JPY 202.7 billion in revenue, so that was +12% year-on-year. Operating income, JPY 42.3 billion, 28.1% positive year-on-year, so very steady. For the different Fintech segments, these are the highlights. Rakuten Card, shopping GTV was JPY 5.9 trillion, a little less than 14% increase. Rakuten Securities general accounts is increasing 11.33 million accounts. Rakuten Securities deposited assets has grown to be large, at JPY 32.3 trillion. Rakuten Bank's accounts almost 16 million now, approaching that. On an independent basis, standalone basis, the deposit balance of the bank is JPY 10.9 trillion. So starting with Rakuten Card, continuous growth is seen.
13.9% year-on-year growth has been seen, and that's in shopping GTV. Operating income is improving. 19% is the margin, and non-GAAP operating income JPY 15.8 billion. Therefore, this is an increase of 18.4% year-on-year. Now, Rakuten Securities, the number of general accounts, as I mentioned, is grown to 11.33 million. And so there has been some impacts from the commissions, the zero commission. It did plummet once, but it has recovered quite well. And Rakuten Bank, there has been independent announcements made, but ordinary profit, or rather, ordinary income JPY 40.8 billion, 25% year-on-year, and our ordinary profit JPY 15.2 billion, and ROE 16.4%.
Therefore, this is an increase of what? 2.5 points year-on-year. And as for the capital adequacy ratio, 11.3%, which is quite high enough, I would say. Now, the number of accounts, 15.8 million accounts of the bank. Actually, it's already above the 16 million mark right now. And Rakuten Payment, again, very strong. Revenue JPY 22.5 billion, which is +23.5% year-on-year, that's percentage. And operating income JPY 1.2 trillion, finally, so it's in the profit-making area. So it's a competitive sector. Now other companies are struggling, but for Rakuten Payment, we have already become profitable. And as you know, in January 2025, we're going to have this reorganization of fintech come into effect.
So moving on to the mobile segment. For Rakuten Mobile, we have more subscribers coming, and then Symphony, and then focusing on the existing, the project, and then increase revenue, and then try working hard to make this profitable as early as possible, and Rakuten Energy, and achieve the increase in the revenue substantially. As shown on this table, for example, EBITDA comparing to the year before on quarter basis, +JPY 225.3 billion in improvement was made. Then, this is a graph in time series, chronological way, and as you can see from this chart, our business has been growing steadily, as you can see here. So among that, MNO, the major business, MNO, and this is about the subscribers number, 7.7 million, and also the adjusted MNO churn rate.
So targeting point and, become a new subscriber to us, and they have become our users only for a short period, and then churn the service, and then we have not granted our points to those, subscribers, so it can be counted as part of churn. So if we exclude the cancellation, and then the, that adjusted MNO churn rate had become the 1.04%, so it's below, it's almost getting closer to below the 1%. We are getting there. And the ARPU is JPY 2,331 . So this is about, number of subscribers, so it's growing steadily, as you can see from here. And then next page, and I think this is very important index. So the, the continuing the same number, which is MNP. So the, we now have this data available.
So Rakuten, starting from January, and, we have net increase of this MNO subscribers, MNP. So these people are using our line mainly, and they are contributing to pushing up our ARPU, and then this is after the adjustment, and MNO churn rate went down to 1.04%. And also, we are improving our communications quality, network quality, and we haven't heard that the it is will not be connected, but we have to have the strongest one, so we will be applying the Platinum Band. And also, the interference with the satellite communications to be mitigating, so-called Sub-6 5G area to coverage to be expanded. And also, the software improvement will contribute to push up the quality, and that is what we would like to do. So this is a unique software.
We have a unique software development capability. That's why this is possible. Initiative did taken.
Now, because Platinum Band is now rolled out, here's a TV commercial. Please watch. Okay. So, good connection, really good connection from... But we will become the strongest, and the best-connected, network of all. So this is the low-band, Platinum Band, effectiveness being shown. And, of course, we had connection that was quite good already, but, we will have even bigger coverage in small alleys or deep indoors, the so-called deep indoors, really inside buildings, still, there will be signals. And so this is the, rollout plan of the, Platinum Band, and, we have front-loaded this by more than one year, against the plan, and we would like to, front-load it as much as possible.
1.7 GHz, that original area had this front-loading earlier deployment by three years against the plan. So we would like to do the same or similar things with the Platinum Band as well. Therefore, we will be quite aggressive in installing or establishing the necessary infrastructure. 5G, which is really much talked about. Well, 5G, there are two parts to that, or two kinds. The conventional 5G antennas, that is 4T4R. What I mean by that is the antenna that will send and the receive antenna, say, will be four by four, that means 16. But beamforming is another one, which is called massive MIMO, which is another type, and the power is tremendously different.
The distance it can travel is much bit longer, and also the quality is different as well. So in case of Rakuten Mobile, you can actually say that Massive MIMO's proportion is much, much larger, and therefore, we can have better coverage and stronger signals. So the question is, once 5G is connected, what is it going to be like in terms of improvement? People who are connected to 5G, compared to the previous time, the traffic has been increased by 2.3-fold, and there are increasing number of unique users connected to 5G as well. And this is not only about Rakuten and other carriers as well, but we were able to increase the quality by mitigating the interference.
This is the data that is being used. So on the average, 30 GB per month, almost approaching that level of 30 GB. So we will soon go beyond that 30 GB mark. In addition, the indoor signal quality is improving quite dramatically as well, at a very fast speed. On the other hand, we are trying to increase our users. Of course, within the group, we have joint campaigns with Ichiba and also Rakuten Card, and these campaigns made a great contribution to the increased subscribers. This is new data that we're disclosing for the first time, and quite impressive, I would say, what you can see here.
Now, please take a look at the fact that the mobile and internet-heavy users are in certain age segments, 23-29, 30-34, and 35-39, and 40-44. These are the different age segments. For example, 30-34 years old, the share is 10.2%. Already, they're using Rakuten Mobile. And for 23-29 age bracket, 8.6% is the Rakuten Mobile share in that age bracket. And in the past half a year, 1.5-fold increase has been seen. And within this year, I think, this 23-29 age segment will likely go beyond the 10% mark. And so I think, the penetration will go up by 2%-3%.
In other words, the heavy users are joining Rakuten Mobile user base, and they will use more of the Rakuten's services.
Next is about increasing ARPU and Rakuten Group. First of all, Rakuten Mobile non-consolidated basis, profit generation, but we are looking at the entire Group performance, and then including contribution to the entire Group, and we calculated this ARPU based on that, which is about JPY 33,030 . Two and a half years ago, which was JPY 1,546 , it already went up by double. And then, as we move forward, the advertising revenue, advertisement reve- cross-sell and AI use new service to be rolled out through all these efforts.
To users, we can make them delight, and then they can pay to our services. That's how we would like to roll out our services to them. And then this is about the ARPU increase chart. So last but not least, about the Rakuten Mobile contribution to the Rakuten ecosystem. As you can see from this graph, and I, I'm sure you understand here, and first of all, they are coming to our ecosystem, which is started from zero, and comparing to this, and then, first of all, to become our subscriber, and then 1.25 services are being used by that new subscribers. And when they joined us, and then it will be increased up to 3.21 in two years.
So how Rakuten Mobile is contributing to create value to our Rakuten ecosystem users, and that can be read from this graph. And for example, Rakuten Ichiba, 49.7% subscribers are spending more GTV comparing to non-subscribers, and also Rakuten Card, 25.9% increase of subscribers basis, as you can see from here. So the synergy impact from this, so if we consider this by quarter basis, it goes beyond JPY 1,000,000 , and our profit contribution is done to the entire group by that, and annualized basis, it's JPY 4,000,000 .
... So that will be including up to the JPY 100 billion or JPY 200 billion, JPY 300 billion. I am expecting that to happen, last but not least, and as I mentioned, the, the hometown tax issue, and this is about NTT Law, and this is very important. Japanese citizens communicate telecommunications and also, Japanese people's human right, which is the, the communication, and it is regulated, and this is very important laws, essential law for that purpose. So now, more than 180 telecommunication operators are against this abolishment, and then, the, we will be strongly object this for this NTT Law. And this is about the business side explanation. And now, so let me repeat what I mentioned. The first one is that Rakuten Mobile is steadily growing, and the second one is internet services.
So quality improvement is something we have focused on, and then the GTV is growing steadily, and also the revenue recovered drastically, and fintech business overall, and in all business segments of fintech performing pretty well. And overseas businesses, the revenue started to be generated, and these are the four highlights from the business perspective. And that's all from myself. And then I will hand this over to the Hirose-san about the financing.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Hirose is my name. I'm the CFO. I would like to present on the finance. So this is a repeat. This is our commitment, disciplined financial policy. We're going to aim for financial soundness in the midterm. And so, profitability improvement and efficiency improvement and financial soundness is what we are striving to achieve. Now, as for the refinancing risk in 2025 and 2025, they have been addressed, as Mr. Mikitani mentioned. And, so we already have a 2024 addressed, and also the senior notes. We have already taken measures to address them.
First call will come for the 2025 domestic hybrid bonds, and we are going to use the products that receive equity-equivalent certifications. And we have various measures of fundraising, so we will make sure that we address this issue. And also, this sales and lease back financing is, and was announced yesterday, and this is a major finance lease. And this period is 10 years, and for the time being, Rakuten Mobile's funding needs will be satisfied. And therefore, for our company, we believe that the liquidity of the capital will improve, and therefore, the cash flow coming from internet services and fintech businesses, among others, can be utilized to reduce the interest-bearing debt.
This is the self-funding path. As you can see here, graphically represented in this fiscal year, internal cash flow can be used for mobile businesses as well as interest payment. We will be able to establish a mechanism to enable us to do that. In addition, we have the sales and lease back added on to that, and therefore, the cash flow can be leveraged to pay back the debt, for example. These are something that the market has been receiving positively, and this is the graphs that shows the yield and also the price trends of in the secondary market. You can see that the market is taking this as a positive.
In other words, the yield has been coming down, and therefore, this is a positive for procurement going forward. Or fundraising forward. And international cash increasing this year, we targeted JPY 50 billion from non-fintech business, but we already surpassed that, and we have already reached JPY 57 billion, and we intend to do further so that the financial base will be further strengthened. So this concludes my presentation on the finance.
The next is about, explained by Ting.
Good afternoon, everyone. Konnichiwa. Today, I'm very excited to share an update on our AI strategy and how it deliver meaningful impact to our employee, customers, and partners. Rakuten is... On the highest level, Rakuten is becoming an AI empowerment company. We are uniquely positioned to become a business leader in AI. Our approach of deploying Rakuten AI is practical and cost-effective. We try to understand the fundamental technology. We build things from ground up, and therefore, we can amplify our impact across the Rakuten ecosystem. And we are also very focused and prioritized towards delivering our business objective, that is Triple 20, and improve 20% operation efficiency, marketing efficiency, and client efficiency. Let me share a few reasons on why we believe Rakuten is well-positioned to become a business leader of AI.
Since Optimism Conference last year, we laid out our vision to augment human creativity with the power of AI. We want to leverage our unique dataset, data asset, including trillions number of transaction data. In addition, we have behavioral data, conversation data, and by leveraging this data, we can make our model higher quality with more efficiency. In addition, we have ubiquitous channel, online and offline, so we can help let the technology to reach millions of customers across almost every categories, from fintech, mobile, and commerce. In addition, since we did Englishnization many years ago, we can attract global talent, and in fact, our large language model team, including talent from many countries, from Singapore, Tokyo, India, and the U.S. And lastly, we have a unique culture. Once we determined to focus on objective, we can conquer any challenges.
Let me share with you a couple of things we are doing, how we are making our Rakuten AI practical and cost-effective. First, we focusing on fundamentals we built from ground up. For example, we build embeddings for every entity in our system, from people, place, and things. With that fundamental understanding, we can uncover new insight, make new connections across the entire Rakuten Group ecosystem. And number two, we leverage our domain expert, human intelligence plus artificial in- intelligence, so we can train the best model and leverage our expertise in so many categories from so many professionals, and deliver the best services for our customer. And lastly, we ride the wave. And as you probably notice, all the large language model performance improving, cost is reducing, and we can take advantage of this market improvement for free. And strategy is nothing without execution.
Since last year, we have been steadily moving forward, executing our strategy in three waves. Number one, we are scaling our deep learning application through our fundamental understanding of embedding, deep learning, and language model technology. And number two, we launched Rakuten AI for Business, and we, we're also incubating Rakuten AI for Consumers. Let me give you a few examples. So our deep learning application, it help customer to discover what they want. It's not only applied to semantic search, but recently, we have deployed technology to recommendations, help people to find the related items, and also we can, through transactions, we learn user profile, we can, recommend more relevant ads to our users. We launched, semantic search on fashion last year and Ichiba this year, and we are on a roll, launching semantic search to all of the Rakuten Group services.
In fact, in a couple weeks ago, we launched a semantic search on Rakuten and Rakuma. The usage patterns and the improvement are consistent across the board by reducing zero-hit ratio, increasing user engagement, using our searching more, coming back to our services more, and therefore generating more benefit and revenue to our merchant and business partners. Another example is recommendation. We're applying the same semantic technology to recommendation. We deployed a state-of-the-art recommendation system in Rakuma, for example, and also to Ichiba. We observed that user engagement, click-through rate, in particular, improved 2 % on Rakuten Ichiba. The GMS from our recommendation system increased to 9%, from the top feed on Rakuma. We also launched Visual Search, a new way for user to discover our product. This is an example.
On the left, you see a picture of a tool at a karaoke party. I couldn't even read the label on the soda can, but AI can help us. In the middle, you see the visual system we had before deep learning, and we used a third-party system, but the results are less relevant than after we deployed our latest Rakuten AI deep learning system. With the latest visual search capability, we can not only deliver better quality for our customers, but also reduce operation cost by 43%. On the business front, we launched Rakuten AI business services for each of our customers earlier this year, but everything we deploy to our external customers, we try and test ourselves. Since the beginning of this year, we launched Rakuten AI for Rakutenians, and 25,000 Rakutenians have used the service.
On every day, on a daily basis, 7,000 people within Rakuten are using Rakuten AI. And they use Rakuten AI for a variety of tasks, such as coding, translation, domain knowledge inquiry, summary, and meeting recap. There are so many task that we are helping Rakuten employees to improve their productivity. On the consumer front, we are also continuously incubating new technology. We announced that, we are working on Universal Concierge that deliver unique, personalized services to our customer. User can interact with our service in multimodality, whether it's image, conversations or search, so we can help them to discover what they want. And lastly, they can use this service to discover all of the services across the Rakuten Group.
Lastly, we are also going to launch Rakuten Mobile AI Assistant very soon, so you, our potential customer, can ask this AI agent questions about Rakuten Mobile 24/7. We can recommend services based on user's history with us and deliver the answer they want without any delay. Thank you very much. We are on the road to deliver material impact to our employees, partners, and customers. Thank you very much.
This concludes the briefing session for the results of Q2. Thank you very much.