Dip - Company History

Dip began with a failing English school. Tomita Hideki took over the school his father had started, watched the bursting bubble push it into the red and his father to the brink of bankruptcy, and stayed on at twenty-six to run it for the new owner. The problem that consumed him was recruitment cost: leaflet campaigns often cost more per enrolled student than a year’s tuition. Then he noticed a pamphlet rack in a Nagoya building where language schools rented shelf space by the month, and saw that it produced enquiries out of all proportion to its cost.

The idea he built from it was to industrialise that rack — put information terminals in busy places, let people order catalogues for schools, weddings or cars free of charge, and sell the resulting customer data to the advertisers as qualified leads. Terminals needed no shelf space and no restocking, so the model could be replicated anywhere. He left the school to pursue it, and spent roughly two years borrowing money to live on while companies praised the plan and declined to buy it. The break came from Japan Incubation Capital, the vehicle set up by Pasona’s Nambu Yasuyuki and SoftBank’s Son Masayoshi to back young founders: they gave him a desk inside Pasona and the standing to secure an unsecured loan. dip Corporation was founded in Nagoya in March 1997.

The terminals themselves were the obstacle. Canvassing restaurant chains, Tomita learned from McDonald’s that IBM was pitching the same kind of installation — and that he could not fight IBM on capital. So he proposed a partnership instead: IBM would supply the hardware, Dip the content. IBM already had terminals in a thousand Tokyo convenience stores; Dip had to fund the operating system itself, which Tomita did by signing clients on prepaid annual contracts before the system existed. The service launched in January 1998, and by 1999 it carried 116 advertisers including Toyota and Honda for about ¥100m of revenue. But it was the staffing category that drew responses far beyond expectation — jobseekers were hunting for agencies to register with — and one large agency told him bluntly that what people wanted was not agency brochures but the jobs themselves. In May 1998 Dip moved to Tokyo and put a temp-work listing service on the same terminals.

Tomita timed the move to the internet deliberately. Once home usage reached roughly a fifth of the population he judged the trend irreversible, and reasoned that connecting the convenience-store terminals to the web would let Dip serve the other four-fifths as well rather than abandoning them. Hatarako.net, a temp-staffing site, opened in October 2000; part-time listings followed in February 2001 and were split out in October 2002 as Baitoru. Two sites, two employment types, one deliberately narrow position — while Recruit held the mass market with print titles, Dip would be an internet-only specialist in temp and part-time work.

What made it grow fast was distribution it did not own. From November 2001 Dip supplied part-time listings to Yahoo! Japan and from January 2002 temp listings, the latter exclusively; traffic from the country’s dominant portal compounded into the platform loop of more listings drawing more jobseekers drawing more listings. Tomita’s response to this success was alarm. The better the partnership performed, the less reason Dip had to build an audience of its own, so he spent while the spending was affordable on brand advertising with well-known actresses.

The bill arrived in December 2003. Dip had already been approved for listing on the Mothers market when Yahoo! gave notice that it was ending the partnership — three days before the IPO, and Dip withdrew its own listing rather than go public on a business plan whose premise had changed. Tomita held the celebration party anyway, told the staff what came next, and rebranded the evening as a graduation from Yahoo!. Six years in, the company had a defensible position in a middle segment the giants treated as secondary, and now had to build its own traffic to keep it.

Dip listed on Mothers in May 2004 with revenue in the low billions of yen, and spent the proceeds on television. The campaigns ran ahead of the revenue rather than behind it — a deliberately front-loaded advertising model — and over a decade the tagline and the celebrity casting welded the category to the brand, so that a part-time job site meant Baitoru. Around the core it launched and quietly deprioritised a string of spin-off sites; earnings stayed concentrated in the original two. When the 2008 financial crisis and the ensuing political backlash against temp work collapsed the staffing market, that concentration was hedged by leaning on part-time listings and adding occupational verticals such as Nurse de Hatarako in 2009.

The decisive break came with the phone. Dip shipped a Baitoru smartphone app in August 2010 and one for Hatarako.net in 2011, arriving early in the 2010–2012 scramble in which job search migrated from PC to mobile and whoever optimised first took the search traffic. Baitoru held a place in the leading group alongside Recruit’s Townwork and Mynavi Baito, and differentiated itself with video listings that showed applicants what a workplace actually looked like.

The economics that resulted were exceptional. Dip moved to the First Section in December 2013; consolidated revenue reached ¥38.1bn in the year to February 2018 with ¥10.8bn of operating profit — a 28.4% operating margin, against roughly 8–9% at Recruit Holdings. Recruit had bought Indeed in 2012 and was globalising the search-engine model; Dip declined to compete there, holding a direct-listing model inside two segments. The ceiling on scale was accepted as the price of the margin, and Tomita began describing the company not as a job-ad publisher but as information infrastructure for the labour market.

In September 2019 Dip launched Cobot, a set of chatbot and RPA tools that automate recruiting admin — interview scheduling, applicant enquiries, careers pages — for small and mid-sized firms. The insight was that a job ad only covers the entrance: everything after an application lands is work the client still does by hand, and Dip already had the sales channel to reach them. It was not a search for a new market so much as a claim on unprocessed work sitting next to the existing one, and it recast the company from job-ad publisher to HR-tech vendor. A corporate venture fund followed in 2020, adding a third layer of startup investment on top of media and DX.

The pandemic then demonstrated exactly why a second pillar was needed. Demand from restaurants, hotels and retail vanished, and in the year to February 2021 consolidated revenue fell 30% to ¥32.5bn and operating profit 42% to ¥7.3bn — the mirror image of the e-commerce and logistics businesses that boomed. The DX segment, at ¥1.0bn of revenue and a ¥440m operating loss, was far too young to cushion anything. Recovery was fast once hiring resumed: revenue reached ¥39.5bn in 2022, ¥49.4bn in 2023, ¥53.8bn in 2024 and ¥56.4bn in the year to February 2025, with ¥13.4bn of operating profit and four consecutive years of growth.

The current questions are about the front door again. In May 2024 Dip launched dip AI, a conversational job search built on generative AI, and in October 2024 Spot Baitoru, entering the same-day gig market behind Timee and LINE. DX revenue reached ¥6.7bn in the year to February 2025 — 12% of the total, ¥3.4bn of profit, and a margin around 50% on a headcount of 209 against 1,727 in the job-ad business. Whether the specialist, high-margin position survives an era in which search itself is being rebuilt depends on whether that second pillar grows large enough to absorb the first one’s swings. Tomita, still president and CEO after twenty-eight years, has also yet to answer the other open question: what comes after the founder.