ABEMA’s free live-streaming of all 64 World Cup matches (2022)

A management style of investment with no deadline

The heart of this decision is that it did not measure additional investment in a loss-making business by “when it would be recouped.” Fujita named no deadline for turning profitable and instead built a structure in which two profit pillars — games and advertising — kept absorbing the media losses. On the strength of that stamina, he piled its largest-ever investment onto the World Cup, a one-off piece of major content, buying awareness and a user base rather than subscription revenue. Beginning with the financial capacity gained in the 2000 listing and continuing through Ameba and AbemaTV, the company’s management style — a profitable business supporting a loss-making one over the long term — is reproduced here again, an order of magnitude larger.

That said, the free live-stream rewriting the viewing records and the business turning profitable are not immediately connected. In the World Cup year the losses actually widened, and a full-year profit took about three more years from there. Even so, one cannot deny that the awareness and the lift in weekly active users won by making it free hastened the later swing to profit. In place of promising a time of recoupment, it concentrates investment all at once at the decisive moment — whether that judgement bears fruit is premised on the continuation of the high earnings of the core businesses that support it. The World Cup bet can be seen as a move played while that premise still held.