Michael Tamblyn

CEO Rakuten Kobo Inc.

Michael Tamblyn is the President and Chief Executive Officer at Rakuten Kobo. Driving growth, profitability and international expansion in a fiercely competitive market, he combines a passion for reading with a deep focus on the hardware and software experiences that can make a customer’s reading life better.

A passionate and engaging presenter and commentator, Michael speaks internationally on digital media, publishing and mobile technology and has been featured in The New Yorker, Wired, Canadian Business, National Post, Globe and Mail and The New York Times.

Michael has been a part of Rakuten Kobo’s executive team since its inception in 2009, and previously held the role of Chief Content Officer.

Prior to joining Kobo, Michael was the founding CEO of the supply chain agency, BookNet Canada and co-founded Canada’s first online bookstore, Bookshelf.ca, purchased by Indigo Books & Music in 1998 to create Indigo.ca.

Michael holds a Masters in Business Administration from the University of Western Ontario.

Main Day Three - Retail Disruption And The Future Of eCommerce

8:45 AM Keynote: Radical Retail – Keeping Customers With A Little Help From Your Friends

Rakuten Kobo has an unusual success strategy. It is a global leader that thrives not by taking away from traditional retail but rather acting as an equalizer – it wins by working in partnership with book retailers around the world to sell eBooks and audiobooks. In doing so, it helps those retailers successfully fight for both sales and customer ownership against competitors sometimes seen as unstoppable.

Why go up against global digital ecosystem players like Amazon, Apple and Google? In 2009, Canada’s largest book retailer, Indigo, realized that eBooks were a competitive threat. Not just because they represented digital disruption of their print book business, but because they were the thin edge of a wedge for customer ownership: A customer who started buying eBooks from a competitor would start buying print books, and soon everything else.

Kobo was founded on the realization that every book retailer around the world would face the same challenge in the fight for customers, or lose to a global player. And Kobo offered local players the benefits of global scale without the massive investments required to go head-to-head on their own.

Michael Tamblyn, CEO of Rakuten Kobo, talks about how Kobo has developed global scale through retail partnerships and in doing so has created not just one of the world’s largest eBook retailers, but also one of the largest coalitions of bricks-and-mortar retailers, each successfully competitive in their own market and benefiting from a digital content ecosystem that improves on a daily basis. Along the way, he asks the question of whether a model that has started in the book sector has wider application, with national players using strategic partnerships to achieve world-class competitiveness.

Check out the incredible speaker line-up to see who will be joining Michael .

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