MIXI - Company History

The company began as a student’s side project. In November 1997, while still at the University of Tokyo, Kasahara Kenji put up a job-listings site after hearing a supervisor at his part-time job complain about what print recruitment magazines charged. On the web, he reasoned, employers could revise a posting at will and search by condition, and without paper costs the listing fee could be far cheaper. He skipped a seminar trip, bought a computer, taught himself to build the site, and got it online. In June 1999 he incorporated e-Mercury to run the job site Find Job ! with ¥3 million of capital; its head office was a borrowed corner desk in the offices of Netage, whose president Nishikawa Kiyoshi — the promoter of the “Bit Valley” plan to turn Shibuya into a Japanese Silicon Valley — taught him how to run a company and later sat on his board. The firm was reorganized as a joint-stock company in October 2000.

What set the next decade in motion was an advertising bill. To grow the job site, e-Mercury paid Yahoo roughly its entire paid-in capital in advertising every month — an education in how expensive attention is to rent. Kasahara began saying he wanted a medium of his own: a service people visited daily would carry the job site’s promotion for free and sell advertising besides. In the summer of 2003, as the company argued over what that medium should be, an Indonesian exchange student on the engineering staff, Batara Eto, showed them Friendster, the US social network popular among his fellow students. Kasahara tried several American SNS designs and concluded that networking pursued as an end in itself would bore users quickly; the point was the relationships themselves, and the site had to be somewhere comfortable to sit. After about four months of development, mixi opened in February 2004.

Invitation-only growth compounded fast: one million members by August 2005, three million by March 2006, 5.7 million by the listing that September, with 800,000–900,000 diary entries written a day and roughly one in three Japanese in their early twenties said to be users. Diaries, “footprints” and communities put the word SNS into ordinary Japanese, and in February 2006 the company renamed itself after the service. The IPO on the TSE Mothers market in September 2006 was a spectacle in itself: against an offer price of $13,330 (¥2m) the shares would not trade on day one, and at the indicated bid of $27,090 (¥3m) the market capitalization reached ¥222.1 billion — more than that of Cyber Agent, its largest outside shareholder — on a company forecasting about ¥4.8 billion of revenue. “I feel the weight of the responsibility,” Kasahara said.

For four more years the service kept growing. Revenue rose from ¥5.2 billion in the year to March 2007 to ¥16.9 billion in the year to March 2011, carried by advertising served to feature phones, with paid revenue added from 2009 as games and other mixi apps opened the platform. Monthly users peaked at around 15 million in 2011, the largest social network in Japan. Yet even at its peak the growth looked modest beside DeNA and GREE, rivals that rode the feature-phone social-game boom past ¥100 billion in revenue.

The ground was already moving. Facebook and Twitter reached Japan in 2008, the same year the iPhone went on sale there, and users began migrating from feature phones to smartphones. Kasahara later described it as “four or five things happening at once.” Worse, mixi’s own strength had calcified: relationships formed years earlier — university friends who had since scattered into jobs — were frozen into the service while real life moved on, and the fixity itself became a barrier to use.

The company opened up in response, dropping invitations for open registration in March 2010 and effectively removing the “footprints” feature that showed who had visited your page in 2011. Both moves thinned the diary-centred communication that had been the point of mixi without giving it a clear position against newer rivals. Facebook passed it on monthly PC logins in June 2011; on smartphones, the free messaging app LINE took the ground. Feature-phone advertising revenue, once abundant, all but vanished, and operating profit fell 34.9% in the year to March 2012. In May 2012 vice-president Harada Akinori, who had come from NTT Docomo, and the executive Koizumi Fumiaki both left the board; reports that Kasahara had sounded out a sale of his stake were denied, but the rumours persisted. Revenue fell to ¥12.6 billion in the year to March 2013, and the quarter to June 2013 brought the first operating loss since the listing.

In June 2013 Kasahara stepped up to chairman and handed the presidency to Asakura Yusuke, the 30-year-old head of corporate planning who had joined only in October 2011, when the startup he founded was acquired. “The competitive and device environment has changed; we have to remake ourselves,” Asakura said before taking office, and turned the company toward smartphone apps and venture investment. The year to March 2014 closed at ¥12.2 billion of revenue and a ¥200 million net loss. Four months into his tenure, in October 2013, the company released a smartphone game called Monster Strike — you drag a character back and let it fly — whose real hook was that up to four people could play together in the same room. It spread by word of mouth through high-school classrooms after school. Free to play with a deliberately low paying-user ratio, it earned more as its base widened; its producer was Kimura Koki, a future president. The idea of gathering friends to play was mixi’s notion of communication, transplanted into a game.

In February 2014, with the hit still only a hint — under ¥100 million of monthly revenue and fewer than a million users — MIXI raised about ¥6.5 billion in a public offering and put nearly all of it into television advertising. The bet decided the outcome. Monster Strike topped the Japanese App Store revenue rankings in May 2014 and was approaching ¥10 billion a month by that autumn. Asakura left after a single year in June 2014 and Morita Hiroki took over. Revenue for the year to March 2015 came in at ¥112.9 billion, more than nine times the prior year, with ¥52.7 billion of operating profit; the following year reached ¥208.8 billion and ¥95.0 billion, an operating margin above 40%. Entertainment accounted for more than nine-tenths of sales. In two years an SNS company had become a games company.

Management, carrying the memory of mixi’s decline, moved immediately to escape dependence on a single title — and moved too fast. In March 2015 it paid ¥11.5 billion, its largest acquisition ever, for Hunza, operator of the ticket-resale marketplace Ticket Camp; in April, Kasahara launched the photo-sharing app Mitene (FamilyAlbum) as a new venture. Ticket Camp’s monthly gross merchandise value grew 4.5-fold in a year, to about ¥3.6 billion by the end of 2015. But resale drew mounting public anger from artists and promoters, police searched Hunza in late 2017 on suspicion of trademark violations, and the service was shut down at the end of May 2018. Morita resigned over the failure to detect and address the problem, and in June 2018 Kimura Koki — the man who had made Monster Strike — became president, introducing an executive-officer system and redefining the company as a “communication-creation company.”

Kimura set out to invest ¥100 billion over three to five years, naming sports and wellness as the next fields and communication as the thread joining them to everything before. In 2019 the company acquired Chariloto, an online betting service for keirin cycle racing; Chiba Jets Funabashi, the professional basketball club; and Net Dreamers, publisher of the horse-racing site netkeiba.com. It moved to the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in June 2020 and launched TIPSTAR, a keirin betting service aimed at the young and female audiences that public racing had never reached. The upfront cost was heavy — the sports segment lost ¥5.3 billion at the operating level in the year to March 2021, as advertising and user rebates failed to bring in the expected numbers — but after a shift to marketing efficiency and cost discipline, and with public racing moving online, the segment turned a ¥2.0 billion operating profit in the year to March 2025. In February 2022 MIXI took control of Tokyo Football Club, operator of the J.League side FC Tokyo, moved to the TSE Prime market in April, and in October 2022 renamed itself MIXI, Inc., putting the corporate logo where the XFLAG games brand had been on the shirts.

The base it was diversifying away from was indeed shrinking. With the domestic smartphone-game market flat, digital entertainment revenue fell from a peak of ¥195.4 billion in the year to March 2016 to ¥83.9 billion in the year to March 2026. In the third quarter of the year to March 2024 the company withdrew five Monster Strike titles for about ¥1.5 billion of cost savings, shifted away from relying on external-IP collaborations to draw players, and looked to extend the life of the ten-year-old flagship while trying overseas again with STRIKE WORLD for India. Governance was tested once more: in 2024 it emerged that Ueda Hiroo, then representative director of Chariloto, and others had improperly received more than ¥1 billion from suppliers, some of it from February 2018, before the acquisition. The investigation delayed second-quarter results by about two months and Kimura returned part of his remuneration. The company added a screening department for supplier selection and made records of supplier meetings mandatory. There was also a return to the origin: mixi2, a short-post social network launched in December 2024, passed 1.2 million registrations in a week, and Kasahara’s FamilyAlbum reached roughly 29 million cumulative users, 30–40% of them outside Japan.

The third change of core business is being attempted abroad. An Australian subsidiary became the first Japanese-owned company to obtain a betting licence there in 2024, and in September 2025 MIXI acquired PointsBet Holdings, an ASX-listed operator in Australia and Canada. The price was raised from A$352 million to A$398 million in June 2025, and the deal was finally settled through a takeover bid that secured 66.4% of the voting rights. Consolidated revenue for the year to March 2026 was ¥171.4 billion, holding a recovery that began from the trough of the year to March 2020, with the sports segment at ¥65.8 billion of revenue and ¥5.1 billion of operating profit. A medium-term vision published in May 2026 named the economy arising from time spent enjoying oneself with family and friends the “We-Time economy,” and set targets of ¥300 billion of revenue, a 20% EBITDA margin and 15% ROE for the early 2030s. From SNS to games to sports and lifestyle: for a quarter of a century this company has kept swapping out its core business while keeping the same axis — people gathering to enjoy themselves together.