From four overseas markets to two: suspending India, folding Indonesia and Korea into the core (2022)

What narrowing made it carry

The way it widened in 2019 and the way it narrowed in 2022 were done at the same speed. It placed frames across four countries and language regions in nine months, and three years later returned to two. Given the nature of the business, that swing is easy to understand. What VTuber operations require is neither factories nor stores but the hands of people to handle recruitment, development and rights processing, and the cost of withdrawing from a market judged unsuitable is small. A lightness that allows trying and folding to be repeated is what characterizes this company’s overseas expansion.

Narrowing, however, is also an act that deepens dependence on the markets kept. Having reduced the overseas frames to two — the English-speaking world and China — any weakness at NIJISANJI EN reads directly as weakness in the whole international business, and feeds straight into the market’s assessment. A downturn in one market that would have gone unnoticed had things stayed dispersed comes to the fore, after consolidation, as a problem of the company. That a consolidation chosen for efficiency was simultaneously a choice to accept a wider swing is what can be read from the course of events since 2024.