Changing presidents and cutting fixed costs (2021)

Where to unwind the inertia of growth

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.