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.
2018New-business investment raised to $72.5M (¥8bn)
2020Falls to a net loss; game-business impairment
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.
The heart of this pivot lies less in the commercial success of a single title than in remaking the very machinery that produced revenue. A model that gathers members for free and sells advertising sees per-user revenue grow slowly even as users multiply, and it ties its earnings to the swings of the advertising market. What DeNA established with Kaito Royale was a design that turned competition and cooperation among users into a motive to spend, and a system for collecting that revenue on its own platform without relying on outside payment. Binding acquisition, billing and settlement into one, this mechanism did not end as a one-off hit but became the structure that would sustain DeNA’s social-game business thereafter.
At the same time, this success left the problem of lopsided earnings. Growth that tripled consolidated revenue in two years concentrated much of it in social games, and led on to the later need for the shift to smartphones, for overseas expansion and for diversification. The choice to rebuild the ad-dependent Mobagetown into an item-billing platform brought DeNA some of the highest margins in Japan, while breeding the next problem — dependence on that growth model. The design that bundles a free entry point with small-sum billing was widely inherited across the mobile-game industry that followed, and DeNA became one of the companies that built that form early.
Can a winning template be moved to another country?
The core of this decision lay in a question: whether the template for success it had built at home could be transferred, as it was, to an overseas market of a different character. In Japan’s feature-phone market, the method of operating a game while watching the numbers and optimising billing produced high revenue. But what that method presupposed was Japan’s peculiar devices, users and commercial customs, and there was no guarantee the same template would work as-is abroad, where smartphones were the lead. That DeNA took in a leading local company whole can be read as a choice to leap over the difficulty of transplantation — buying finished development capability and a market rather than learning it the hard way itself.
Yet what the acquisition secured was development capability; it could not buy the time to close the cultural gap between Japan and abroad. The difficulty of integration lay on a different axis from the sum paid. ngmoco’s dissolution and the later impairment show that this bet did not bear fruit as hoped. Still, which was right — growing an internationally viable form from scratch on one’s own, or taking in a local company and stepping in all at once — cannot easily be pronounced now. In which market, and in what configuration, to make the strengths built at home tell — the theme DeNA put to the world early would go on being re-asked, in changed form, each time it ventured into a new field.
The upshot of reading a loss-making ball club as “the most effective advertising”
The core of this decision lies in reading a loss-making ball club not as a source of losses but as advertising spend that raised the company’s name recognition and brand — an idea that swapped the backward-looking ring of the word “deficit” for the vocabulary of investment. As President Moriyasu noted, citing annual advertising and promotion outlays of just under $250.7M (¥20bn), the aim was less to advertise a product than to make up for a recognition that lagged the scale of the business, and to run recruitment and user acquisition to advantage. Measured on the same yardstick as ordinary advertising, the effect of a club’s name being reported over and over on national news made an annual loss of a little over $25.1M (¥2bn) not necessarily a costly purchase — such a calculation appears to have been at work.
That said, reading the club purchase as advertising alone cannot fully explain the turn to profit that followed. Under Jun Ikeda, DeNA rebuilt attendance, and in 2016 it acquired Yokohama Stadium to run club and ballpark as one. Reworking a club it had written off as an expense into a business that earned from both the game and the venue is what brought a utilisation rate above 90% and a move into the black five years after the acquisition. The initial “advertising” account was the doorway for stepping in while accepting the loss; the corporate effort beyond it made the difference that turned expense into asset. The 2024 Japan Series title and record attendance were a destination on the extension of that line.
Why layer a cross-shareholding on top of the alliance?
At the core of this decision is that a business alliance alone was not enough — it layered a cross-shareholding on top. Nintendo had to open to DeNA its intellectual property, viable worldwide, and DeNA to open to Nintendo its experience building and operating mobile services. A relationship in which each entrusts the other with the know-how that is the source of its strength is hard to protect by the clauses of a contract alone. As Moriyasu said, it was “to build a robust relationship of trust over the long term”; the mutual investment can be read as collateral, in the form of capital, that neither could easily walk away from. The balance of roughly equal outlays was a design meant not for a control in which one stood above the other but for an equal collaboration.
Yet the tie of capital did not presuppose permanence. In 2022, after the joint development bore fruit and several hit titles were born, DeNA sold half its holding, answering the market’s demand of the day to review cross-held policy shares. The need to secure trust with capital is highest at a relationship’s outset; once the business begins to run on its own, that need fades. That the alliance continued even as the mutual investment shrank bears out that the cross-shareholding was not the goal but the means to get the collaboration on track. For a social-game company whose growth had slowed, seeking its next growth by joining with powerful outside intellectual property, this was an alliance drawn to include how capital would be used — and when it would be let go.
The core of this crisis response lay less in the financial loss itself than in how to face the damage to trust that the way it ran the business had invited. DeNA had built, in mobile games, a style of gathering page views through search and expanding a business on speed and volume. The root of this problem lay in carrying that style into the domains of medicine and health — where accuracy can be a matter of life and death — without first putting a vetting system in place. In the sequence by which President Moriyasu closed every site, entrusted the dissection of his own company to an outside committee, and took responsibility by cutting his pay, there was a reckoning with the very way the business was run.
That said, the question this problem posed does not stop at DeNA alone. How far does media that chase scale on inflows from search bear responsibility for the accuracy of the information they carry, and for the rights of others? The venture temper that prizes speed and experiment is a force that gives rise to new businesses, but in domains bearing on people’s health and safety it can also become an excuse for skipping the trouble of verification. The observation that the words “permanent venture” had become an indulgence for expansion remains as a question that continues to this day — how a company in a hurry to grow reconciles itself with public responsibility.
The core of the 2021 change of president appears to lie less in laying the blame for poor results on a single manager than in shrinking a management built on the premise of continued growth down to the true size of what the company could earn. The rapid growth that Mobage’s success brought DeNA had, on the flip side, rooted in the company an organisational scale and cost base that assumed expansion would go on. The breadth of business Moriyasu spread over ten years still carried the problem of revenue dependence on games, and now faced the environmental change of the shift to smartphones. The first net loss since listing, and the declaration of a fixed-cost review that preceded it, showed that deferring that problem had reached its limit.
The new structure — welcoming Okamura, from the communications ministry, as president, with Namba supporting as chairman — started with reining in fixed costs and managed a return to profit the following year. But that the year ended March 2024 again sank to a net loss tells that instability remained in the base of earnings. Even though the worldwide hit of Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket produced a large profit in the year ended March 2025, an earnings structure that swings on the success or failure of a single title is continuous with the problem that has run since Mobage. What management, having cut fixed costs and eased the weight of expense, will next be asked is how to build a quality of earnings that can stack profit without relying on a hit. The question of where a company that ran on as a venture acquires the discipline of a mature company remains open even after the 2021 change.
The implication of returning the founder to the presidency is that it was not a change to hold anyone accountable for results but a decision to walk back into the fire herself, on the far side of a large profit. Namba had handed management to Moriyasu in 2011 and to Okamura in 2021, advancing a generational handover twice. To swing that flow into reverse for once and return to a structure in which the founder stands at the front, for a fixed term, was likely because she judged that the speed of decision-making, and the drawing power to push back the market’s low valuation, had to be regained now, by her own hand. It is a bet fit to be called a second founding.
Whether the bet pays off hinges on whether the policy of concentrating resources on AI reaches beyond efficiency to give rise to new businesses. While holding up “permanent venture,” DeNA has faced the distortions of a culture in a hurry to grow — the loss of trust at WelQ, the 2021 change of president. This return, too, lies on the extension of the same problems: earnings that swing on a single title, and new businesses that never quite grow up. Can a way in which the founder leads change for a set period regain, at once, speed and challenge for a company that has matured — including a shift to a non-pyramid organisation? At the time of writing, the answer is not yet in.
Each heading links to the full Japanese analysis — background, decision and outcome, with sources.
This is a condensed English edition. The full, source-by-source history — with the detailed narrative, financial tables, shareholders and executives — is maintained in Japanese: 日本語版（詳細）— DeNA full history in Japanese →
DeNA Co., Ltd. — 有価証券報告書 (annual securities reports) and earnings briefings (決算説明会).
Report of the third-party investigation committee — 第三者委員会調査報告書, 11 March 2017 (the WelQ curation-media inquiry).
NIKKEI STYLE — 日経スタイル, 1 July 2019.
logmi Biz — ログミーBiz, 16 December 2021.
GLOBIS Chiken-roku — GLOBIS知見録, February 2014. globis.jp.