DeNA - Company History

DeNA began in 1999, when Tomoko Namba quit her partnership at McKinsey at the height of the dot-com boom and set up the company in Shibuya, Tokyo. The idea, she later recalled, came when she pitched a friend on a mobile-phone auction site and was told to go build it herself. Its founding business, the PC auction service Bidders, launched that November carrying high hopes but could not break the network effects Yahoo Auctions had already built; the outsourced system arrived without a single line of code, and an in-house engineer rebuilt it from scratch over months without going home — a glimpse of the founding scramble.

What saved DeNA was cash and candour. It raised money while staying debt-free, and though it had to write down capital and reserves to cover losses in 2003, it came through with about $4.3M (¥500m) in cash still on hand — the reserve that let it weigh its next move rather than fold. The auction had failed as a business, but admitting that quickly and keeping both money and time in reserve bought the runway for what came next. That reflex — concede a loss early, redirect the reserve — became the agility on which the company would run.

In March 2004 DeNA launched the feature-phone auction Mobaoku, resolving to build in mobile the advantage it had failed to build on the PC, and pouring resources into a market the large players had not yet entered. Within a year mobile revenue passed Bidders. A January 2005 alliance with KDDI — which took a third-party share placement and opened its carrier “official menu” — secured cheap user traffic, and in February DeNA listed on the TSE Mothers market. In February 2006 it launched the social network Mobagetown, cementing its place as a mobile-content company.

In October 2009 DeNA released Kaito Royale, a social game built around item billing. It designed short, repeated sessions and player-to-player relationships to turn competition and cooperation into a motive to spend, and it collected the money on its own platform rather than through outside payment channels — a shift from an advertising model to a billing one. Quarterly revenue leapt, and by the year ended March 2013 DeNA reached a record profit. Games became the group’s earnings engine for more than a decade, and the company came to stand for Japan’s booming social-game market.

Scale brought both diversification and scrutiny. In 2011 Isao Moriyasu, an employee since the early days, became president and founder Namba moved up to chairman; that same year DeNA paid $81.5M (¥7bn) for 66.92% of the Yokohama BayStars, entering professional baseball to buy nationwide brand exposure. In 2012 the “complete-gacha” controversy over gambling-like game mechanics forced the whole industry to act, and DeNA capped spending by users under eighteen. Behind the record numbers, the concentration of earnings in games raised, before investors, the question of a lopsided portfolio — and growing a pillar to rival games would prove hard.

DeNA’s structural weakness was its dependence on games, and the 2010s were spent — expensively — trying to find a second pillar. Its 2010 purchase of the US developer ngmoco for about $400 million, meant to take the model global, never closed the gap between Japan’s operate-and-tune approach and America’s product-led development culture; ngmoco was dissolved in 2016, and in the year ended March 2020 DeNA booked a $478.6M (¥51bn) impairment on its game business. A rare bet that paid off was the 2015 business and capital alliance with Nintendo, a mutual investment that opened Nintendo’s worldwide intellectual property to DeNA’s mobile-operations know-how.

The hunt strayed furthest with media. In 2014 DeNA bought the curation sites iemo and Peroli for $35M (¥4bn) combined, and in December 2016 the reliability scandal at its health site WelQ drew wide public criticism. A third-party committee condemned a culture in which hitting revenue and profit had become the supreme mandate, and in which the slogan “permanent venture” had turned into an indulgence; Moriyasu accepted that the company had to be remade toward balancing social worth against the numbers.

The diversification pushed on anyway. In 2018 DeNA raised new-business investment to $72.5M (¥8bn) across live streaming, an automotive taxi-hailing app and healthcare, none of them profitable in the near term, and in May 2019 it announced a roughly $458.7M (¥50bn) buyback — itself an admission that it could not find enough to invest in for growth. The pattern held: each acquisition tended to end in a write-down, and escaping the dependence on games stayed out of reach.

In April 2021, on the back of weak results, DeNA changed presidents. Shingo Okamura — a former communications-ministry official who had run the Yokohama DeNA BayStars — took over, with founder Namba supporting as chairman, and set about cutting fixed costs hard, matching the cost base to what the business actually earned rather than to the growth it had assumed. Choosing a president with a bureaucrat’s background was itself a message: the discipline of a listed venture giving way to that of a mature company. Even so, the diversification bets kept ending in write-downs — the live-streaming firm IRIAM, bought for $81.1M (¥9bn) in 2021, and the healthcare firm Allm, bought for $188M (¥25bn) in 2022, were both impaired.

The reckoning came in the year ended March 2024, when those impairments and further game losses dropped DeNA to a $189.4M (¥29bn) net loss, exposing the founding dependence on games once more. Yet the BayStars — bought as “the most effective advertising” — had become part of the company’s identity, winning the 2024 Japan Series and drawing record crowds, lifting both brand and recruiting. Then in October 2024 Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket, co-developed with The Pokémon Company, became a global hit and powered a large profit in the year ended March 2025 — the recovery, once again, riding on a single title.

In February 2026 DeNA brought back founder Tomoko Namba as president after fifteen years — not a change of accountability but a “second founding,” a fixed-term bet on remaking the business around AI. Alongside it, the company announced the sale of investment securities and a buyback of up to $316.1M (¥50bn), reshaping its finances toward a capital allocation that trims surplus cash and preserves borrowing capacity, prompted by dialogue with a large shareholder. The Nintendo shares taken in the 2015 alliance were among those sold, though the business tie through Nintendo Systems was kept — a company trading its reflex for taking scale on speed for one of choosing, against the cost of capital, where to spend.