Panasonic Corp. has carefully cultivated a culture befitting its 100-year history, with many employees starting the day doing calisthenics and singing the corporate anthem. Now, Yasuyuki Higuchi is supposed to shake up those traditions. Higuchi, 60, last year took charge of the connected solutions business, ...

E-commerce giant Rakuten Inc. is offering a glimpse into its ambitious plan to build a cutting-edge wireless network to take on Masayoshi Son's SoftBank Group Corp., stay in the lead in mobile payments and win back market share from Amazon.com Inc. The new mobile business, ...

Masayoshi Son has a lot going on these days. The SoftBank Group Corp. founder oversees the largest technology fund in history and is putting money into ride-hailing, e-commerce, digital payments, satellites, semiconductors, agriculture and cancer detection — just for starters. How to make sense of it ...

Mercari Inc. priced its initial public offering at the top of the range to sell ¥130.5 billion ($1.2 billion) worth of shares, a valuation that's set to make its 40-year-old founder a billionaire. The online marketplace plans to sell 43.5 million shares at ¥3,000 apiece, ...

The mobile phone industry may be in a midst of a slump, but a unit of Sharp Corp. is forecasting growth thanks to the race by smartphone makers to wow customers with high-quality photos. Kantatsu Co., a maker of camera lenses for Apple Inc. and ...

Self-driving cars will rarely have to deal with a pack of drivers who think they are in a "Fast and Furious" movie, but training them to do so might just be what it takes to reach true autonomy. Nonetheless, sending driverless vehicles drifting around curves ...

SoftBank Group Corp.'s Masayoshi Son became technology's biggest investor over the past year, taking major stakes in ride-hailing, e-commerce and semiconductors. But he doesn't get much credit for his investment acumen. SoftBank trades well below the value of its assets, which include equity in public ...

Bike sharing has a lot going for it. It's mass transit that's ultracheap, burns body fat instead of fossil fuels and is adored by venture capitalists. But the business model has hit a major snag: parking. Stringent laws against sidewalk clutter — and cultural sensibilities ...

While people fret about robots taking human jobs, machines in Japan are stepping in to fill vacancies amid the worst labor shortage in more than 40 years. That is creating an opportunity for up-and-coming startups focused on automating warehouse tasks. Nitori Holdings Co., the nation's ...

Yusuke Mitsumoto had a hunch: What if you paid people instantly for their used goods over the internet, with no guarantee that they would hand them over? The 36-year-old e-commerce entrepreneur launched an app in June to test the idea. It worked better than he ...