Company history

In December 1980 Sugino Kimihiko incorporated Sugino Kosan in Sennan, Osaka, with capital of $13,234 (¥3m), taking over the roller-skating rink his father had run. The rink he opened at Izumiotsu the same month came with an arcade corner attached — the first sign of the choice that would define the company. Rather than perfect one amusement, he put several under one roof, on the reasoning that a site holding customers longer, across weather and across ages, converts floor space into revenue far more reliably than any single attraction can.

In July 1982 sixteen bowling lanes were added to the same Izumiotsu site, so that roller skating, bowling and arcade games all traded from one address. The rink itself closed in 1987, but the arithmetic held, and in December 1990 the Ishizu store in Sakai settled the template that the company still builds to: indoor, multi-format, large-scale — a single box designed to absorb an entire family or group of friends for an afternoon.

The corporate form then caught up with the format. In March 1993 Sugino and one other founded a separate company, Round One (the original entity), with capital of $89,944 (¥10m); that September Sugino Kosan sold it part of its business, including the whole of the Izumiotsu store. In August 1994 Sugino Kosan bought out its shares, and in December it absorbed the subsidiary outright and took its name — the company built for the format was folded back into the parent, and its name became the parent’s. A move to offices in front of Sakai station followed in February 1995, set up as the base for a chain across the Kansai region.

June 1997 brought the first store east of Kansai, at Totsuka in Yokohama; two months later the shares were listed on the second section of the Osaka Securities Exchange. Tokyo’s second section followed in December 1998, and in September 1999 the stock was designated for the first sections of both exchanges — three steps in roughly two years, an unusually fast route from a family amusement business to a first-section company. The point of the sprint was funding: the indoor box proven at Ishizu was capital-hungry to replicate, and a nationwide rollout needed a market to draw on.

The second move was to the format itself. Bowling drew a customer base skewed towards middle-aged men, which capped both utilisation and spend per site, so in July 2004 the Kyoto Fushimi store opened with Spo-Cha attached — roller skating, batting cages, three-on-three basketball, table tennis, billiards, darts and karaoke packed into one hall as a single all-you-can-play sports amusement. It pulled in families, couples and mixed groups of friends, and lifted occupancy and average spend at the same time. From then on new stores were built Spo-Cha-equipped as a matter of course, and Round One stopped being a bowling operator and became an operator of indoor leisure complexes.

What made the format durable was that it was indoor and therefore indifferent to weather and season, and broad enough to hold several age groups in the same building. Trading softened somewhat through the 2008–09 financial crisis, but nothing in that period challenged the competitive position of the core format — which is precisely why the company would soon try exporting it unchanged.

Round One Entertainment Inc. was set up in the United States in April 2009, and in August 2010 the first overseas store opened at Puente Hills in California. The strategy was deliberately unimaginative: take the mall-tenant version of the domestic complex and drop it into American suburban malls exactly as it stood. American malls were losing their anchors, and vacated space could be fitted out cheaply — so the same heavy, single-site, all-formats-in-one bet that worked in Japan could be placed for less, on the wager that an experience tenant could pull footfall back into a dying property.

It did not pay quickly. The American stores ran at a loss for several years, and Sugino held to the position that the United States was the growth engine of the following decade rather than of the current one. Nothing about the format was diluted to suit the market: the scale of each site and the mix of bowling, arcade and Spo-Cha under one roof went in intact. From the late 2010s utilisation rose, and the American business began to take over the job of offsetting a home market that had stopped growing.

Two other overseas moves ran alongside. A Russian subsidiary was formed in 2019 and opened in the Evropeisky centre in Moscow in December 2020, but the store closed in April 2022 and the market was effectively abandoned after the invasion of Ukraine. A Chinese entity followed in September 2019, and the first store there opened in May 2021 at an AEON Mall in Xintang, Guangdong — the same mall-tenant transplant, tried a second time. Meanwhile the pandemic pushed the group into an operating loss in the year to March 2021, the sharpest demonstration yet of how little a fixed, capital-heavy box can flex when its customers cannot come.

The exchange reshuffle of April 2022 moved the shares from the TSE first section to the Prime Market, and trading recovered in earnest from the year to March 2022 onward. The structural change came next. Round One Japan was incorporated in April 2023 and Round One Delicious, carrying the food business, in September 2023; in April 2024 the operation of the indoor leisure complexes was transferred to Round One Japan and the listed parent became a pure holding company.

The point of the reorganisation was that a maturing Japan and a growing United States and China no longer belonged in one operating entity. Each now sits in its own company, optimised on its own terms, with the parent doing group oversight rather than store operations. In June 2024 Round One Delicious Holdings, Inc. and Round One Delicious USA, Inc. were established in the United States, and in February 2025 the food business was transferred across — the food function consolidated in America, where the growth is.

By the year ended March 2025, American revenue reached $488.5M (¥73bn), roughly forty per cent of the consolidated total: the export absorbing the slack left by a saturated home market. Sugino, past three decades in the chair, remains president and largest shareholder with around 59.69 million shares, holding effective control while his agenda narrows to two items — making the American and Chinese businesses the core of the group, and running each operating company on its own best terms beneath the holding structure.