Billionaire has a new goal for his 17,000 workers: learn to code

The Rakuten Inc. logo is displayed behind a counter inside the company's cafe in Tokyo, Japan, on Monday, Jan. 28, 2019. Rakuten's chief executive officer Hiroshi Mikitani says the company is aiming to lower prices in Japan's wireless market. Photographer: Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg

Less than a decade after stunning workers at his Japanese tech giant with an edict to learn English, billionaire Hiroshi Mikitani wants to do the same with computer programming. 

Rakuten Inc may soon expect its more than 17,000 employees to know how a computer compiles a programme and understand the difference between a CPU and GPU (one is the brains of a PC, the other runs the graphics). Underpinning that is a mandatory, entry-level ability to code.