CyberAgent - Company History

In March 1998 Susumu Fujita, twenty-four, left the staffing firm Intelligence and set up CyberAgent in Minato, Tokyo. It began with no product of its own: its first income came from acting as a sales agent for WebMoney, earning purely on its selling. In July 1998 it launched CyberClick, a click-guaranteed banner-and-text ad product, and turned itself from a sales agent into an internet-advertising company. Crucially, it outsourced all system development to On the Edge (the future Livedoor) under a five-year exclusive deal paying 10% of sales as royalties, keeping its own people on selling and client work. By January 2000 it had lined up 4,728 ad-carrying media — selling power, not a product, carried the early margins.

In March 2000 CyberAgent listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Mothers market, and its market value briefly touched $3.6B (¥390bn). It put the $192.1M (¥21bn) it raised into an investment-incubation business, backing internet ventures — just as the dot-com bubble burst and those holdings collapsed in value. Raising over ¥20 billion two years after founding was extraordinary for a company its age, and the write-downs soon ate into the profits of the core ad-agency business. In 2001 the Murakami Fund, spotting a company whose cash exceeded its market value, launched a shareholder proposal — an early collision between founder control and outside capital.

Fujita chose not to shrink the business and hand back the cash, but to absorb the losses with the ad agency’s profits and press on. In 2003 he issued a “lifetime employment” declaration to hold down turnover, and by the year ended September 2004 the group swung back to profit and formally opened the investment-incubation segment. In May 2004 it introduced the CAJJ program, splitting new ventures into subsidiaries graded J3/J2/J1 on rolling gross profit and — unusually — disclosing the withdrawal thresholds to outside investors. In September 2004 it launched the Ameba blog. The template of many disclosed-criteria subsidiaries, and of a sales-only startup becoming a company that owns its own media, was set here.

In July 2005 CyberAgent set up an Ameba division and pushed into media in earnest. In 2006 it began hiring engineers — a heavy pivot for a company whose centre of gravity had been its sales force — because once it decided to own media, it had to own the technology behind it. That in-house engineering later became the seedbed for the Cygames games business and the ad-tech that powers its ad delivery. Under the cover of the ad agency’s profits, Ameba was allowed to run at a loss until it turned profitable in June 2010, giving the group a revenue source that did not depend on selling ads.

In May 2011 Fujita declared a “smartphone shift,” reallocating development from PC to mobile ahead of most of the industry, and in 2013 sold off CyberAgent FX to concentrate resources. In September 2014 he restructured the Ameba business, killing low-margin services and halving its headcount from 1,600 to 800 — a decision that reached straight into the organisation’s structure three years after the shift he had declared. Most of those people were redeployed into the group’s games and ad-tech units rather than let go, keeping the know-how in-house.

The smartphone shift let mobile games grow into a segment second only to advertising. The customer base built in the ad agency and the development capacity built for the shift combined to spawn the games business; the group’s model of semi-independent games subsidiaries kept studios autonomous while sharing ad and platform know-how. A one-legged advertising company had become a three-domain group — advertising, games and media.

In April 2015 CyberAgent set up AbemaTV as a joint venture with TV Asahi and entered internet television. Cumulative investment passed $761.2M (¥100bn) and AbemaTV’s negative net worth reached $845.7M (¥111bn), but the portfolio held: the profits of advertising and games absorbed the media losses. This was the same structure as the founding-era arrangement in which the ad agency’s profit tolerated the incubation losses — the same shape, an order of magnitude larger. The TV Asahi tie-up joined terrestrial programming know-how to streaming operations.

The magnitudes of the cycle show in the numbers. AbemaTV’s negative net worth swelled from ¥66.5 billion in FY2019 to $845.7M (¥111bn) in FY2022, and FY2019 carried a net loss of $178M (¥19bn). Against that, in FY2021 the games segment earned ¥96.4 billion and internet advertising ¥22.5 billion while media stayed at negative ¥15.1 billion — two profit engines carrying one loss-maker, quantified. In 2018 the group brought in Zelvia, operator of the J-League club FC Machida Zelvia, for $10.4M (¥1bn), and in March 2019 moved its head office to Abema Towers.

The founder’s control met outside discipline at the December 2019 AGM, where the approval rate for Fujita’s reappointment fell to 57.56% after the proxy adviser ISS opposed on the thinness of outside directors. Meanwhile the earnings swung on a single hit: in the year to September 2021 CyberAgent reached a record $6.1B (¥666bn) in sales and $950.1M (¥104bn) in operating profit on the strength of the game Uma Musume, yet on an unconsolidated basis it booked a ¥90 billion provision against loans to AbemaTV and fell to a $628.5M (¥69bn) net loss. In 2022 it took the domestic rights to the FIFA World Cup and streamed all 64 matches free on ABEMA, spending game profits to buy awareness rather than subscribers — a bet with no fixed payback date.

In March 2023 CyberAgent announced a succession plan built around promoting a successor from within, and the board began cultivating candidates. Rather than clinging on, Fujita — prompted by an internal document that imagined his own future self — chose to move early, grooming 16 candidates aged in their forties or younger over several years and putting the tacit knowledge of running the company into a written handover. The chain runs back to the 2019 shareholder revolt that forced governance reform, whose committee became the vessel for this plan: it was not sudden, but placed on top of institution and preparation.

Even so, weaning the group off founder-dependence is not done. The handover, first set for 2026, was pulled forward to 2025, and Fujita stays on as chairman with continued CEO-level involvement under a two-representative structure. The heaviest recent move is to pull the makers of intellectual property inside the company by acquisition: it added the stage producer Nelke Planning in June 2023 and the content producer Nitroplus in July 2024, created an Anime & IP division in February 2024, and set up the anime studio CA Soa in January 2025. A company that at its founding outsourced its ad-delivery system to On the Edge is moving from buying in the content it supplies to games and ABEMA toward generating, in-house, works whose rights it holds.