Koei Tecmo Holdings - Company History

Updated: Author:

Financial history 2010–2026 — revenue, cost structure, balance sheet, cash flow and key ratios, year by year →

Founded 1978
Founder Erikawa Yoichi
Founding location 栃木県足利市
Core business at founding Wholesaler of dyes and industrial chemicals
Listed 1991
President & CEO Koinuma Hisashi President & CEO since 2025 (age 55, as of 2026)
Current priority New product development · Overseas expansion Creating an original IP at the ten-million-unit level and reaching the global top ten by operating profit
Founding
In July 1978 Erikawa Yoichi founded Koei in Ashikaga, Tochigi Prefecture, as a wholesaler of dyes and industrial chemicals, to rebuild a family business that had gone bankrupt the year before. In October 1980, on his thirtieth birthday, his wife Erikawa Keiko gave him a Sharp MZ-80C; he began writing games on it himself and released his first, Kawanakajima no Kassen, in 1981. Nobunaga’s Ambition followed in 1983 and Romance of the Three Kingdoms in 1985, and the company withdrew from dyes. Tecmo, the partner it would later combine with, was incorporated in July 1967 as Nihon Yacht Co., with building maintenance and the sale of commercial amusement machines as its main businesses; it took the name Tecmo in January 1986 and settled into the mass-market genres of action and sports.
The Decision
It turned down a takeover and chose a share transfer with an equal. In 2008, as rising development costs increased the pressure for consolidation across the industry, a Tecmo shaken by internal conflict rejected a takeover proposal from Square Enix and chose instead an equal combination with Koei by share transfer. In April 2009 the holding company Koei Tecmo Holdings was formed by share transfer, and in April 2010 Koei and Tecmo merged to become Koei Tecmo Games. In December 2011 it acquired Gust, which held the Atelier series, and absorbed it in October 2014, bringing development back in-house. In February 2025, after a handover fifteen years in the preparing, Erikawa Yoichi passed the presidency to Koinuma Hisashi and became chairman, while Erikawa Keiko moved to head a newly created asset-management subsidiary. The founding family stepped back from running the core business, but management of the money stayed in Erikawa Keiko’s hands.
Today
Securities investment now yields more non-operating income than the core business earns in operating profit. Revenue of $558.3M (¥88bn) in the year ended March 2026 was made up of $519.7M (¥82bn) from Entertainment, $29.7M (¥5bn) from Amusement and $7.6M (¥1bn) from Real Estate, so that games account for almost all of it. Operating profit was $234.6M (¥37bn), but non-operating income of $252.3M (¥40bn) lifted ordinary profit to $360.4M (¥57bn) and net profit to $270.6M (¥43bn). Erikawa Keiko’s private investing has been organised into an in-house asset-management function, and the surplus funds it runs have grown from about $1.1B (¥120bn) in 2020 to about $1.1B (¥160bn) in 2025. Koei Tecmo Corporate Finance Co. was established in February 2025, and in April that year the rights and obligations of the securities-management business held by the games subsidiary were transferred to it by absorption-type split. The split makes the economics of the games company and the economics of the investment arm visible in separate sets of accounts.
Competition
While others widened their development capacity by acquisition, Koei Tecmo kept reselling IP forty years old. In 2003 Square joined Enix after the failure of its film venture, and in 2009 Square Enix acquired Eidos and took on overseas development studios. Capcom restructured around its in-house RE ENGINE and shifted towards digital distribution, moving from selling packaged copies outright to continuing revenue and raising its margins. Koei Tecmo acquired almost no outside studios after the combination, and has instead resold Nobunaga’s Ambition, Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Musou along four routes — new titles, DLC, mobile versions and collaborations with other companies’ IP. The operating margin in the year ended March 2026 was 42.0 per cent and overseas sales were 44 per cent of the total. Against that, the only original new IP to pass eight million units is Nioh, released in 2017, and the ten-million-unit hit the fourth medium-term plan calls for will need development investment of a different kind from repeating the IP it already has.

Timeline

1978–2008Two independent houses: historical simulation out of a dye wholesaler, action out of building maintenance

  1. 1967Nihon Yacht, the forerunner of Tecmo, is incorporated
  2. 1978Erikawa Yoichi founds Koei in Ashikaga, Tochigi
  3. 1981Tehkan releases Pleiads, its first in-house amusement title
  4. 1981Koei releases its first entertainment title, Kawanakajima no Kassen
  5. 1983Koei releases Nobunaga’s Ambition
  6. 1985Koei releases Romance of the Three Kingdoms
  7. 1986Tecmo releases its first console title, Mighty Bomb Jack, and takes the name Tecmo
  8. 1989Tecmo releases Tecmo Bowl and Ninja Gaiden in the United States
  9. 1996Tecmo releases the fighting game Dead or Alive
  10. 2008Tecmo and Koei sign the integration agreement

2009–2018Executing the merger: a holding company, eight straight years of profit growth, and one brand

  1. 2009Koei and Tecmo combine; Koei Tecmo Holdings formed by share transfer and listed
  2. 2009Management of Koei’s four overseas sales subsidiaries taken over by absorption-type split
  3. 2009The four overseas sales subsidiaries become direct wholly owned subsidiaries
  4. 2010KOEI Corporation and TECMO, INC merge as TECMO KOEI AMERICA Corporation
  5. 2010Group reorganised around Koei Tecmo Games and two other core companies
  6. 2011Gust, the studio behind Atelier, becomes a wholly owned subsidiary
  7. 2014Hyrule Warriors released
  8. 2014English style changed to KOEI TECMO; holding company renamed
  9. 2015The combined operating-profit target set at the merger is met, four years late
  10. 2017Nioh passes one million units sold worldwide

2019–2026The <em>Nioh</em> hit, a bigger investment portfolio, and the handover from the Erikawas

  1. 2019Atelier Ryza released; the series later passes five million units
  2. 2020Nioh 2 released
  3. 2020Koei Tecmo Games moves its head office to Minato Mirai, Yokohama
  4. 2021Revenue rises 41 per cent in the year ended March 2021
  5. 2023A second consecutive record year: revenue ¥78.4bn, operating profit ¥39.1bn
  6. 2024Rise of the Ronin released
  7. 2024Non-operating income of ¥35.7bn exceeds operating profit of ¥28.5bn
  8. 2025Koei Tecmo Corporate Finance established as a subsidiary
  9. 2025Securities-management rights and obligations transferred to Koei Tecmo Corporate Finance
  10. 2025Koinuma Hisashi becomes representative director, president and CEO
  11. 2025Fourth medium-term plan targets a global top-ten place by operating profit

Founding Story

1978–2008Two independent houses: historical simulation out of a dye wholesaler, action out of building maintenance

For three decades the two halves of Koei Tecmo grew up apart, and neither began in games: one was a wholesaler of dyes and industrial chemicals in Ashikaga, the other a building-maintenance and amusement-machine business incorporated in Tokyo as a yacht company. By 2008 Koei had turned a birthday present into two of the longest-running franchises in Japanese games and carried no debt, while Tecmo was being sued by its own star producer and had run out of room to stay independent — which is what brought the two to the same table.

The dye wholesaler’s heir who crossed into games with <em>Kawanakajima no Kassen</em>

In July 1978 Erikawa Yoichi (襟川陽一)[1] founded Koei in Ashikaga, Tochigi Prefecture, as a wholesaler of dyes and industrial chemicals[2]. He set it up to rebuild a family business that had gone bankrupt the year before, and its original trade had nothing whatever to do with the games industry. The turning point came in October 1980, when his wife Erikawa Keiko (襟川恵子) gave him a Sharp MZ-80C personal computer for his thirtieth birthday[3]. From there Erikawa Yoichi began writing his own games for the machine, and in October 1981 released his first, Kawanakajima no Kassen (川中島の合戦)[4]. At a time when computer RPGs and adventure games from abroad dominated the Japanese market, it opened a genre of its own — historical simulation set in the Sengoku period.

By the time Nobunaga’s Ambition (信長の野望) was released in March 1983 the company had shifted its centre of gravity to software development and withdrawn from the dye business. With two flagship series, Nobunaga’s Ambition (1983) and Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三國志, 1985), Koei established historical simulation as a genre and laid the foundation of long-lived IP that later entrants could not easily copy. The change of business was a decision to concentrate the firm’s resources on what was then an emerging niche, self-developed simulation games for personal computers: nothing from the dye-wholesaling years — not the sales channels, not the customers, not the commercial know-how — carried over to the games business, making it a change of industry in the literal sense. The resolve Erikawa Yoichi made at thirty was described in a later interview as follows.

Historical simulation series remained the centre of earnings, but through the 1990s Koei also pushed into other genres. The securities investment that would characterise its balance sheet in later years began in the same period, with Erikawa Keiko bringing into the company the know-how she had built up investing in shares on her own account. Some thirty years after its founding, Koei was an independent games company with two distinguishing traits: debt-free management, and IP operated over the long term. Tecmo, the company it would later combine with, had entered the games industry by a different route.

Building maintenance and <em>Ninja Gaiden</em>: Tecmo’s thirty crooked years and the crisis of 2008

Tecmo, the merger partner, was a company of separate descent, incorporated in July 1967 as Nihon Yacht Co.[5] Its main businesses were building maintenance and the sale of commercial amusement machines[6]. Its serious entry into game development began with the arcade title Pleiads (プレアデス) in 1981 and the Famicom titles Mighty Bomb Jack and Tehkan World Cup in 1986; in January of that year it changed its trading name to Tecmo[7]. Where Koei had carved out a genre of its own in historical simulation, Tecmo grew in the mass-market genres of action and sports, and the complementary IP portfolios underpinned growth after the two came together. Through the 1990s and 2000s it established its representative action, fighting and creature-raising IP, among them Dead or Alive, Ninja Gaiden (忍者外伝) and Monster Rancher (モンスターファーム).

In 2008, however, Tecmo faced a severe management crisis. That May Itagaki Tomonobu (板垣伴信), lead producer of its flagship titles Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden, sued the company and its president Yasuda Yoshimi (安田善巳) for ¥148 million in unpaid success-based compensation[8]. Tecmo dismissed Itagaki that June, and he raised his claim to more than ¥164 million[9]. In August Yasuda announced his resignation for personal reasons, and chairman Kakihara Yasuharu (柿原康晴), the second-generation head of the founding family, took on the presidency as well in an emergency arrangement[10]. The company’s results had been slowing through the second half of the 2000s, and with internal conflict and a change at the top coming at once, continuing as an independent company became difficult.

In November 2008 Koei and Tecmo announced that they would combine in April 2009[11]. At the announcement Koei’s president Matsubara Kenji (松原健二) set out a profit plan to double the two companies’ combined operating profit within three years[12], while Tecmo’s president Kakihara Yasuharu explained the background to the decision in terms of a business environment in which competing alone had become difficult. The grounds for the combination were the long friendship between the two founders, complementary IP portfolios — historical simulation on one side, action and fighting games on the other — and room for cost savings by rationalising overlapping North American subsidiaries and domestic sales networks. Behind it lay a structural change in the industry: with the generational shift in home consoles (PS3, Wii and Xbox 360), development costs per title had risen to three to five times the scale of the previous generation, so that independent mid-sized games companies could no longer carry the burden of development investment alone.

2009–2018Executing the merger: a holding company, eight straight years of profit growth, and one brand

The combination of April 2009 was carried out in stages rather than at a stroke: a holding company first, then a single operating company, then the absorption of the studios it bought, and finally, in 2014, a rebranding that put Koei’s name ahead of Tecmo’s in English. Underneath the reorganisation two engines were turning — long-lived IP resold along four routes, and an investment arm run by Erikawa Keiko — and between them they produced eight consecutive years of record earnings on revenue that barely moved.

A holding company, and a wholesale repositioning onto the “Koei first” style

On 1 April 2009 Koei and Tecmo established a joint holding company, Koei Tecmo Holdings — styled in English at the time as TECMO KOEI HOLDINGS — by share transfer; both companies were delisted the same day and the holding company was newly listed[13]. The share-transfer ratio was 0.9 shares in the new company for each Tecmo share and one share for each Koei share[14], making it, on a combined enterprise-value basis, a combination led by Koei. That December Koei’s four overseas sales subsidiaries were reorganised directly under the holding company[15], switching to a structure in which the global sales network was managed centrally at holding-company level. In January 2010 the North American entities KOEI Corporation and TECMO, INC were merged and renamed TECMO KOEI AMERICA Corporation[16], a first step towards brand integration in North America.

In April 2010 Koei and Tecmo were merged to form Koei Tecmo Games Co., consolidating development and publishing into a single core operating company[17]. At the same time the group’s business domains were reorganised into three companies: Koei Tecmo Games alongside Koei Tecmo Wave (media, rights and pachi-slot) and Koei Tecmo Net (online)[18]. In April 2011 Koei Tecmo Games absorbed the last of the old Koei and old Tehkan entities that had been re-established during the transition, completing the final shape of the operating-company integration[19]. In December 2011 it took full ownership of Gust, the studio behind the Atelier (アトリエ) RPG series[20], bringing the JRPG genre in-house alongside Koei’s historical simulation and old Tecmo’s action titles. In October 2014 Gust was absorbed into Koei Tecmo Games, completing the full internalisation of the acquired studio[21].

In July 2014 the holding company changed its English style from TECMO KOEI to KOEI TECMO, and at the same time altered the form of its legal Japanese name from コーエーテクモホールディングス株式会社 to 株式会社コーエーテクモホールディングス[22]. It was a global rebranding in the fifth year of the combination, aligning group companies, overseas entities and even title logos on the English style that put Koei first. In brand terms it acknowledged what had already been the case at the time of the combination on combined enterprise value, number of IPs and scale of revenue: that Koei led. From consolidated revenue of $445M (¥36bn) and ordinary profit of $92.8M (¥7bn) in FY11 (the year ended March 2012), the company reached revenue of $352.4M (¥39bn) and ordinary profit of $165.8M (¥18bn) in FY18 (the year ended March 2019) — revenue flat, but ordinary profit two and a half times larger. The plan drawn up immediately after the combination, aiming at combined operating profit of $210.6M (¥17bn) for the year ending March 2012, was achieved in 2015, four years late.

Investment income the equal of operating profit — Erikawa Keiko’s asset-management arm

What characterised the finances of Koei Tecmo Holdings after the combination was that investment income swelled to a scale on a par with operating profit from the core business. From FY15 (the year ended March 2016) onward, non-operating income was booked at between $55.1M (¥6bn) and $73.5M (¥8bn) every year, and in FY18 (the year ended March 2019) non-operating income of $76.1M (¥8bn) sat against operating profit of $108.7M (¥12bn), leaving the two almost evenly matched. The source was the return on an investment arm that placed roughly $905.8M (¥100bn) to $1.4B (¥160bn) of surplus group cash in shares, structured notes and similar instruments, run under an arrangement in which Erikawa Keiko oversaw investment policy. She had invested in shares on her own account since the age of eighteen, and the know-how she had accumulated privately since the Koei years was organised into a corporate function at the holding company after the combination.

The games industry has a structure in which rising development costs and the hit-or-miss fate of released titles swing single-year results by 20 to 30 per cent against the previous year. Koei Tecmo’s results in this period ran the other way: from FY11 to FY18 both ordinary profit and net profit rose without interruption. Eight consecutive years of record earnings rested on two wheels — stable profit from the core business, and investment income from outside games. In FY19 (the year ended March 2020), the tenth anniversary of the combination, the company delivered a ninth consecutive year of profit growth, its highest earnings since the combination, and a dividend of ¥60 a share (after a one-for-1.2 share split). Investment income played the part of offsetting single-year swings in the core business, and contributed to the stability of the dividend policy — either a payout ratio of 50 per cent or ¥50 a share[23].

Dependence on investment income was, however, ambivalent as a criterion for institutional investors. The achievement of raising the profit margin of the core games business, and the contingency of an accounting treatment that folds unrealised gains and losses on the investment portfolio into ordinary profit, sit side by side in the same set of accounts. That the breakdown between core-business profit and investment income was disclosed in ever greater detail at each results briefing from FY15 onward reflects how closely the market was watching that dependence. Running the profit of the games business and the return on investments through separate companies — an organisational split — was already being argued internally by management in this period as a structural proposition, and would be implemented later, in the establishment of a corporate-finance subsidiary in April 2025[24].

Selling the same IP four ways: new titles, DLC, mobile and collaborations

By the 2010s the earnings structure of Koei Tecmo Games had turned into a machine for monetising the long-lived IP it had held since its founding, over and over, across multiple platforms and revenue formats. Nobunaga’s Ambition, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Musou (無双, released overseas as Warriors), Dead or Alive, Atelier and Winning Post were each rebuilt to generate revenue along four routes: new packaged releases, DLC, mobile versions, and collaboration titles built on another company’s IP. A collaboration title combines the settled fan base of an original work with Musou-style gameplay; it carries lower development risk than building new IP in-house from scratch, and even after paying a licence fee its economics are easier to foresee — a commissioned form of development. Hyrule Warriors (ゼルダ無双, 2014) and Fire Emblem Warriors (ファイアーエムブレム無双, 2017) are the representative examples, and the product design of borrowing the rights to a popular IP from Nintendo or another publisher and recasting it with the feel of Musou play took hold.

Overseas sales of the main IP also expanded through the 2010s. On packaged-game unit sales by region as at FY19 (the year ended March 2020), 2.95 million units were sold in Japan against 6.69 million overseas — 2.85 million in North America, 1.57 million in Europe and 2.27 million in Asia[25] — so that the overseas share reached close to 70 per cent of units sold. There were regional tendencies: the historical simulation lines centred on Japan, the Musou and Dead or Alive lines on Asia and North America. Across the group as a whole, however, a balanced geographical spread was achieved. That raised resistance to swings in currencies and in regional economies, and softened the single-year variation in core-business profit.

Internally, Koei Tecmo Games kept several independent brands side by side — the Shibusawa Kou brand, ω-Force and Team NINJA among them — with each brand running its own IP and development organisation on its own profit and loss, an in-house brand system. Koinuma Hisashi (鯉沼久史), president of Koei Tecmo Games from 2015, said in a 2023 interview that this in-house brand system had begun to bear fruit in the 2020s[26]. An organisation in which several IPs and several development brands run in parallel was also a mechanism for preventing a delay or a poor launch on any single title from striking group results directly.

Read the full history in Japanese →

Notes

  1. Koei Tecmo Holdings, annual securities report — Directors and Officers section↩
  2. Koei Tecmo Holdings, annual securities report — Directors and Officers section↩
  3. 4Gamer, “[CEDEC 2023] Interview with Koei Tecmo’s Erikawa Yoichi: half a century on from the founding, the blueprint for becoming number one in the world has come into view” (Arai Yosuke, 5 September 2023)↩
  4. シミュレーション&ゲーミング (Simulation & Gaming), 1990, “Simulation through the feel of a game”↩
  5. Koei Tecmo Holdings, annual securities report — corporate history section↩
  6. Koei Tecmo Holdings, annual securities report — corporate history section↩
  7. Koei Tecmo Holdings, annual securities report — corporate history section↩
  8. ITmedia News, 18 November 2008↩
  9. ITmedia News, 18 November 2008↩
  10. ITmedia News, 18 November 2008↩
  11. ITmedia News, 18 November 2008↩
  12. ITmedia News, 18 November 2008↩
  13. Koei Tecmo Holdings, annual securities report — corporate history section↩
  14. Koei Tecmo Holdings, annual securities report — corporate history section↩
  15. Koei Tecmo Holdings, annual securities report — corporate history section↩
  16. Koei Tecmo Holdings, annual securities report — corporate history section↩
  17. Koei Tecmo Holdings, annual securities report — corporate history section↩
  18. Koei Tecmo Holdings, annual securities report — corporate history section↩
  19. Koei Tecmo Holdings, annual securities report — corporate history section↩
  20. Koei Tecmo Holdings, annual securities report — corporate history section↩
  21. Koei Tecmo Holdings, annual securities report — corporate history section↩
  22. Koei Tecmo Holdings, annual securities report — corporate history section↩
  23. Koei Tecmo Holdings results briefing, 26 April 2018↩
  24. Koei Tecmo Holdings, annual securities report — corporate history section↩
  25. Koei Tecmo Holdings annual report for the year ended March 2020↩
  26. Famitsu, “VIP interview: Koei Tecmo Games president Koinuma Hisashi on opening up new IP toward a ten-million-unit title, and building an internal structure that promotes cooperation and competition” (Hayashi Katsuhiko, 29 May 2023)↩

References & sources

  1. Koei Tecmo Holdings Co., Ltd. (annual securities reports), including the corporate-history section; the annual report for the year ended March 2020; and the FY25 results briefing setting out the fourth medium-term management plan (2025–2027).
  2. Famitsu, “VIP interview: Koei Tecmo Games president Koinuma Hisashi on opening up new IP toward a ten-million-unit title, and building an internal structure that promotes cooperation and competition” (Hayashi Katsuhiko, 29 May 2023).
  3. 4Gamer, “[CEDEC 2023] Interview with Koei Tecmo’s Erikawa Yoichi: half a century on from the founding, the blueprint for becoming number one in the world has come into view” (Arai Yosuke, 5 September 2023).
  4. Koei Tecmo Holdings, Integrated Report 2025 — message from the new chairman (Erikawa Yoichi).

Yen amounts are converted at the average rate of each figure’s own year — not today’s rate; revenue charts are shown in yen. Exchange rates & sources — the full ¥/US$ table →

Data API

Koei Tecmo Holdings’s history, presidents and financials are published as static JSON — no key, plain GET. One API per public page, and one per section where a page carries several tables. Full specification →

/api/3635/company.json ·/api/3635/history.json ·/api/3635/ceo.json ·/api/3635/financials.json ·/api/3635/financials/segment.json ·/api/3635/financials/pl.json ·/api/3635/financials/cf.json ·/api/3635/financials/bs.json ·/api/3635/financials/employee.json ·/api/3635/financials/stock.json ·/api/3635/financials.csv ·/api/3635/financials_history.csv

/api/companies.json ·/api/decisions.json ·/api/api-manifest.json