Company history

In November 1989 Yasufumi Kanemaru, then thirty-five, set up Future System Consulting in Kagoshima. A Kobe University engineering graduate who had learned system development on the job at the accounting-software firm TKC and at Logic Systems International, he built the company around a single idea: design a client’s business reform and the IT system meant to support it as one, inside the same project. Japan’s systems-integration industry was then dominated by the keiretsu subcontracting pyramids formed in the mainframe era — captive vendors tied to the computer makers — and independent consultants who combined business knowledge with engineering were rare. Future planted itself in that gap.

The model was ikkitsūkan — end to end: from the upstream grand design of the business down to operation and maintenance, all completed inside its own group, choosing the best technology for the client rather than any maker’s package. Being independent meant freedom from vendor lock-in; but with no keiretsu behind it, Future could win work only on the quality of its proposals and the results it delivered. It aimed at the sectors with the largest core-system renewal demand — distribution, finance and the public sector — where that integrated approach paid off.

It reached the public market fast. A US arm, Future Architect, Inc., opened in Santa Cruz, California in 1997; in June 1999, ten years after founding, Future registered its shares over-the-counter with the Japan Securities Dealers Association — early for an independent IT-consulting pure-play. In February 2000 it moved its head office to Shibuya, Tokyo, completing the shift from a small Kagoshima start-up to a metropolitan consultancy. The founding template — never separating the business from the IT — would underpin every later move, from the diversification to the holding-company reorganization.

In June 2002 Future listed on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, confirming its standing as an independent IT-consulting pure-play. Through the 2000s it built out an adjacent structure — a Future Investment arm in 2005, an office in the United Kingdom — and in January 2007 it absorbed the consulting subsidiary Woodland, renamed itself Future Architect, and moved its head office to Shinagawa, consolidating the group under a single brand.

From the early 2010s it diversified by acquisition — content and media (the firm now called Tokyo Calendar, 2012), e-commerce and retail (2013), programming education (CodeCamp, 2015) — reaching into fields adjacent to its consulting core. In April 2016 it split the IT-consulting business into a newly created subsidiary, Future Architect, converted the parent into a pure holding company, and renamed it Future Corporation. The single-business firm became a group: consulting under Future Architect, ERP under FutureOne, media under Tokyo Calendar, education under CodeCamp — functional and sector subsidiaries under one holding company. In 2017 it bought the manufacturing-IT firm Y.D.C. (now Future Artisan) from Yokogawa Electric.

But the money stayed in one place. When segment reporting began in FY2015, IT consulting earned about $38M (¥5bn) on $177.7M (¥22bn) of sales, while the new-media and web arm ran a loss and the business-revitalization arm made almost nothing. The acquisitions were less new profit pillars than new customer contacts and testing grounds for technology; group profit was earned, as before, by the consulting core. Revenue rose only gently across these years, but margins held — because the high-value consulting business at the group’s centre never wavered.

From 2018 Future completed the absorptions it had begun — taking Y.D.C. fully in-house, folding in security (D.I.T., now Future SecureWave, over 2018–19), adding sports (2020) and, in a run of deals from 2022, buying the AI firm Neiro, then Curiosity, and in 2024 the management-strategy consultancy Revamp — extending the group’s reach from IT consulting into strategy consulting proper. What it was assembling was a way to take on a client’s whole management problem by function rather than by project — the same instinct, to lean on no keiretsu and shoulder the whole problem, that had defined it since 1989, now carried out by acquisition.

The results compounded: consolidated revenue grew roughly two-and-a-half fold in twelve years, from $307.4M (¥30bn) in FY2013 to $507.9M (¥76bn) in FY2025, and net profit nearly sixfold, to $78.2M (¥12bn). After generative AI arrived in 2022, Future made AI-adoption support its main growth field, staking its edge on integrated management–IT–AI consulting built around large language models and gathering its sharpest people in their twenties and thirties into an advanced-AI corps. As an independent with no keiretsu behind it, it kept investing its own capital ahead of visible returns — through asset write-downs along the way — a stance Kanemaru framed not as hype but as patient, shop-floor improvement.

In March 2026 Yasufumi Kanemaru — who had led the group for more than thirty-six years — stepped back to representative chairman, and Tomohiko Taniguchi became president. Taniguchi had joined in 2002 out of Kobe University’s graduate school, run group companies, and taken the presidency of Future Architect in 2024 — a home-grown successor. The handover from founder to a second generation marks the point at which the independent-consultancy creed, and the generative-AI bet, pass to the next leadership.