None — formed by share transfer between Bandai and Namco in 2005
Revenue · FYE Mar 2026
$8.5B (¥1.35tn)
Net profit · FYE Mar 2026
$889.6M (¥141bn)
Bandai Namco Holdings: long-term performance & turning pointsSales (revenue) and profit-margin ratio
Sales (¥ bn)Net margin (%)
2005From a merger of toys and games to management along an IP axis
Revenue (¥ bn, bars) · net margin (%, line)
Source: securities reports
FY2006 · consolidated
Revenue$3.9B
Net income$121M
Net margin3.1%
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FY2014 · consolidated
Revenue$4.8B
Net income$236M
Net margin4.9%
2005Bandai and Namco combine; the holding company Bandai Namco Holdings is established
2005Takasu Takeo becomes the first president
2006Amusement facility business spun off from Namco to form the new Namco
2008Banpresto’s prize business spun off; its game business absorbed by Bandai Namco Games
2008Ishikawa Shukuo becomes president
2010First net loss, $340.7M (¥30bn)
2010The IP-axis strategy begins
2011Back in the black, with operating profit of $204.3M (¥16bn)
2013The Content segment posts its highest revenue and profit since the union
The holding company came into being in September 2005 as the answer two firms gave to the same shrinking home market, and its first decade went to the unglamorous work of sorting toys, games and arcades into specialist subsidiaries — a reorganisation that ran straight into the Lehman shock and produced the group’s first net loss. What pulled it out was not a new business but a new way of using the old ones: running a single character across every category at once.
The Gundam co-development that drew the two companies together
In September 2005 Bandai and Namco set up a joint holding company, Bandai Namco Holdings, by share transfer and listed it on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. In the year before the union Bandai had revenue of $2.5B (¥270bn) (operating profit $220.6M (¥24bn)) and Namco $1.6B (¥179bn) (operating profit $136.2M (¥15bn)), so the combination created an entertainment conglomerate on the scale of $4.1B (¥450bn). The toy and amusement industry of the day expected the domestic market to shrink with the falling birth rate, and securing enough scale to roll a piece of intellectual property out across categories had become a problem shared across the sector. The union began with the development, from 2004, of a PlayStation 2 title the two firms handled jointly, Mobile Suit Gundam: One Year War (機動戦士ガンダム1年戦争). That joint work confirmed how their technology and their businesses complemented one another, and in December 2004 Bandai’s president Takeo Takasu approached Namco’s chairman Masaya Nakamura about a full business tie-up — the opening of the union. The exchange ratio was set at one share in the new company for each Namco share and 1.5 for each Bandai share — terms favourable to Bandai — so a framework led by the larger of the two was laid down from the start.
Bandai, which had relied on outside studios for its game software, opened a path to bringing planning and development in house by pairing with Namco and its deep internal development organisation. Namco, tied to a domestic amusement market with little merchandise sales, put Bandai’s IP product lines onto sales channels centred on North America and began to expand globally. That both companies shared the same reading of the era — that the domestic toy and arcade markets would shrink as the birth rate fell — pushed the union along as well. Takasu Takeo (髙須武男), who came from Bandai, became the first president, charged with building the organisational framework of the holding company and with bridging the different corporate cultures of Bandai and Namco. Each firm had reached its customers through a separate channel — toys in one case, arcades in the other — and fusing product planning with digital development had to begin by grinding the two organisational cultures together.
A ¥29.9 billion loss in the middle of restructuring
For several years after the union the post-merger reorganisation continued. In March 2006 the amusement facility business was spun off from Namco into a newly established company, the new Namco, and at the same time Bandai’s video game division was transferred to Namco — later Bandai Namco Games — by absorption-type split. In April 2008 the prize business was spun off from Banpresto into a new company while Bandai Namco Games absorbed Banpresto’s game business, and the following year Bandai Networks was absorbed as well. While the work of sorting toys, games and amusement into specialist subsidiaries went on in fits and starts, Bandai Namco Holdings recorded its first net loss, $340.7M (¥30bn), in the year ended March 2010.
Demand fell away after the Lehman shock: revenue dropped to $4.3B (¥379bn) and operating profit shrank to a mere $21.6M (¥2bn). On top of that came $249.5M (¥22bn) of extraordinary losses, including impairments on the amusement facility business, which widened the deficit. Ishikawa Shukuo (石川祝男), from Namco, had become the second president in June 2008, and he took command of the structural reform through this loss-making period. Operating profit recovered to $204.3M (¥16bn) in the year ended March 2011, but it did not reach the $307M (¥36bn) of the year ended March 2006, the group’s first, and turning the union into managerial fruit still needed time. Posting a net loss in the fifth year after the union became a test of whether a portfolio assembled out of separate businesses could withstand swings in the external environment. Amusement facilities draw their custom in direct proportion to the business cycle, and the fact that their earnings cycle does not line up with toys or games was thrown into relief once again.
The turn when the IP-axis strategy drove the recovery
Operating profit returned to $433.6M (¥35bn) in the year ended March 2012 and reached $498M (¥49bn) in the year ended March 2013, on revenue of $5.0B (¥487bn). The recovery was led by the Content business — now the Digital business — which in the year ended March 2013 recorded segment revenue of $2.6B (¥252bn) and segment profit of $373M (¥36bn), the highest levels since the union. Within a portfolio of Toys and Hobby at $1.7B (¥166bn) and Amusement Facility at $615.8M (¥60bn), this was the point at which the Content business stepped forward as the pillar of profit. The method of running the same intellectual property across several categories at once, over the wall between toys and games, began to show in concrete figures, and the synergy sketched at the time of the union was at last borne out in earnings. The rapid expansion of the social game market on mobile phones and smartphones was a tailwind too, and the strategy of extending the group’s own IP into the digital domain lifted results.
Interest-bearing debt shrank from a peak of $222.4M (¥21bn) in the year ended March 2009 to $52M (¥6bn) by the year ended March 2014, leaving the balance sheet close to debt-free. The equity ratio held steady at around 66 per cent, evidence of the constitution that had carried the group through the years of reorganisation. Yet while the Content business ran well, the domestic amusement facility business posted a segment loss of $8.5M (¥900m) in the year ended March 2014, and the earnings gap between businesses remained. Earning in the digital domain while struggling in facility operation pointed to a difference of constitution between the businesses that would later lead to the decision to separate the facility business into a specialist subsidiary. The pattern persisted: core IP became the earner in the digital business, while running outlets in the real world stayed dragged down by its high sensitivity to the economic cycle.
2015IP-axis management and an adult market opened at the same time
Revenue (¥ bn, bars) · net margin (%, line)
Source: securities reports
FY2015 · consolidated
Revenue$4.7B
Net income$310M
Net margin6.6%
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FY2021 · consolidated
Revenue$6.7B
Net income$445M
Net margin6.6%
2015Taguchi Mitsuaki becomes the third president
2015Revenue and operating profit pass the group’s first-year level for the first time
2017Bandai Namco Holdings China established as regional headquarters for mainland China
2018BANDAI SPIRITS established to gather the high-target and prize businesses
2018Amusement machine business transferred to the new Namco, later Bandai Namco Amusement
2018BANDAI S.A.S. switches to the role of a European regional holding company
2019Records of $6.7B (¥732bn) in revenue and $770.6M (¥84bn) in operating profit
2021Kawaguchi Masaru becomes the fourth president
The seven years from 2015 were the longest run of expansion the group had known, and its engine was the discovery that the shrinking birth rate could be answered by ageing the customer rather than the product — Gunpla and collector figures gathered into a company of their own. By the end of the stretch revenue had grown from $4.7B (¥565bn) to $6.8B (¥889bn), and the question was no longer whether toys and games could be run together but how many axes the group could run at once.
The run-up to consecutive records under Taguchi Mitsuaki
In April 2015 Taguchi Mitsuaki (田口三昭), from Bandai, became the third president. Revenue for the year ended March 2015 was $4.7B (¥565bn) and operating profit $465.2M (¥56bn), both exceeding the level of the group’s first year for the first time since the union. Core IP such as Dragon Ball, Aikatsu! (アイカツ), The Idolmaster (アイドルマスター) and Mobile Suit Gundam grew in digital and in toys and hobby simultaneously, and an earnings structure that did not lean on any one hit began to come into view. The method of raising several pieces of IP in parallel, and running each across several business domains, was taking root as the source of stable earnings. From this year the group entered the longest expansion in its results since the union, with the simultaneous development of multiple IP as the pillar of growth.
By the year ended March 2018 revenue reached $6.1B (¥678bn) and operating profit $679.3M (¥75bn). The segments settled into a composite structure that was neither purely toys nor purely games: Toys and Hobby at $1.9B (¥213bn) (profit $130.4M (¥14bn)), Network Entertainment at $3.7B (¥404bn) (profit $473.7M (¥52bn)) and Visual and Music Production at $471M (¥52bn) (profit $113.2M (¥13bn)). Over the three years from 2015 to 2018 revenue rose by $1.1B (¥120bn) and operating profit by $172.1M (¥19bn). It was the longest run of consecutive growth since the union, and Asako Arihisa (浅古有寿), the fifth president, would later sum it up as the period that built the foundation of IP-axis management. This was the stage at which running many businesses across the wall between toys and games at last bore out in figures the synergy sketched at the time of the union. The Network Entertainment margin climbed to nearly 13 per cent, and the shape of a group moving away from the earnings structure of its toy-centred years came into view.
The reorganisation that opened the high-target market
In April 2018 the group carried through a reorganisation that transferred Bandai’s high-target business and Banpresto’s prize business to a new company, BANDAI SPIRITS. At the same time it executed an absorption-type split transferring the amusement machine business of Bandai Namco Entertainment to the new Namco, now Bandai Namco Amusement. The aim was to separate toys for children and figures and hobby goods for adults into distinct corporate bodies, and to specialise product development aimed at a core customer in their late twenties and above. A dedicated organisation was set up to handle high-priced goods — assembly kits of the kind epitomised by Gunpla (ガンプラ), the Gundam plastic model line, and figures for collectors — with a structure that quickened decisions from product planning through to sales.
The effect of the reorganisation showed early. Revenue for the year ended March 2019 reached $6.7B (¥732bn) and operating profit $770.6M (¥84bn), both records. Rising sales of high-target goods, Gunpla foremost among them, bore out the proposition that growth was possible even in a domestic market with a falling birth rate, provided the group shifted its weight to a core customer with high unit prices and high gross margins. On the overseas side, Bandai Namco Holdings China Co., Ltd. was established in December 2017 to take on regional oversight of mainland China, and the following year BANDAI S.A.S. in Europe transferred its toys and hobby business and switched its own role to that of a regional holding company. The building out of regional oversight functions advanced in parallel, and the division of roles among local bases needed to run Japanese-born IP worldwide began to take shape. Setting up regional holding companies in China and Europe also meant a shift: local selling that the Japanese head office had handled directly was now entrusted to managerial judgement fitted to the character of each market.
Stay-at-home demand under COVID and a record in the seventeenth year
In April 2021 Kawaguchi Masaru (川口勝) became the fourth president. In an investor interview Kawaguchi presented portfolio management on four axes — IP, business, target and area — as the group’s strength, setting out a framework that avoided at once the risk of depending on a single piece of IP and the risk of depending on a single business. Delivering the same IP to different target groups through toys and through games, and running the same business differently by region, was a multi-axis strategy that became the foundation for the expansion in results that followed. Kawaguchi came from Bandai and had worked on the shop floor of the toy business, yet he belonged to the generation that inherited the DNA of Namco and Bandai equally, and he took the helm at a point when the combined strength of IP management was being put to the test.
In the year ended March 2022 revenue reached $6.8B (¥889bn), operating profit $954.6M (¥125bn) and net profit $705.6M (¥93bn), all records. With stay-at-home demand under COVID as a tailwind, ELDEN RING became a worldwide hit and lifted the digital business, while the toys and hobby business set a record of its own in parallel. Seventeen years on from the union, the figures showed how far the group had come back from the $340.7M (¥30bn) loss of its first phase, as IP-axis management coincided with a following wind from outside. In April of the same year the group moved to the Tokyo Stock Exchange Prime Market and, at the same time, split off Sunrise by absorption to establish Bandai Namco Filmworks, bringing the film production and rights management of the Gundam IP under one roof. In an interview from the same period Kawaguchi described his intention to make the company more aggressive still, together with its employees, and spoke of the next shape of growth.
2024Revenue passes ¥1 trillion for the first time, at $6.9B (¥1.05tn)
2025Co-investment contract signed with Legendary Pictures for a live-action Gundam film
2025The new Bandai Hobby Center is completed in January
2025Bandai Namco Filmworks America established for the North American market
2025Asako Arihisa becomes the fifth president; Kawaguchi Masaru moves to the chairmanship
Revenue crossed $6.9B (¥1.05tn) for the first time in the year ended March 2024, and in the same breath the group met a plateau: operating profit fell while Gunpla demand outran the capacity of the factories that made it. The presidency passed from a product man to a finance man, and the questions that followed were about the quality of earnings and where the money should go rather than about scale.
Reaching ¥1 trillion, and investing to raise Gunpla output
In the year ended March 2023 revenue was $7.0B (¥990bn) and operating profit $828.4M (¥116bn). A reaction against the exceptional demand of the COVID years coincided with a gap between new console game titles, so the figures dipped slightly against the previous year, yet they held for a second year at the highest level since the union. In the year ended March 2024 revenue reached $6.9B (¥1.05tn), passing ¥1 trillion for the first time and giving the group the scale of a true entertainment conglomerate. Operating profit, however, came in at $598M (¥91bn), down $170.3M (¥26bn) on the previous year, weighed down by constraints on plastic model production capacity and by the absence of a console game hit. Revenue had passed the ¥1 trillion mark, but a plateau in growth arrived at the same moment, and a new managerial problem — reconciling the expansion of the figures with the quality of the earnings — came to the front.
On the supply side, existing factory capacity could not keep up with worldwide demand for Gunpla, and investment in a new plant, the Bandai Hobby Center, was decided. The new plant was completed in January 2025, began operating that summer and is scheduled to reach full operation in 2026. Ten multi-colour moulding machines and eighty-four single-colour machines are to be installed in stages, in a plan that will allow output across the plastic model business to rise by roughly 35 per cent against the 2023 financial year (earnings briefing, FY24 Q2). The popularity of the IP rebounded as a supply constraint, and a problem particular to a growing company — factory capacity unable to keep pace with the appetite of the fans — came to the front. A manufacturing competitiveness that rests on the group’s own plants rather than on outside contractors turned out, in places, to be unable to absorb the expansion in the value of the IP. In the same period Kawaguchi spoke of a policy of rolling IP products out worldwide simultaneously, setting out the idea of synchronising product supply on a global scale.
The handover to Asako Arihisa and the 360-degree investment idea
In 2025 Kawaguchi Masaru stepped back to the chairmanship and Asako Arihisa, who had served in corporate planning and as CFO, CISO and CSO, became the fifth president. Momoi (桃井) took the vice-presidency with responsibility for group strategy, in a division of labour under which Asako would strengthen the managerial base while Momoi handled the strategy of attack. In his inaugural statement Asako summed up twenty years since the union — the first president, Takasu, made the shape of the group; Ishikawa and Taguchi who followed breathed a soul into it; and the current president, Kawaguchi, has expanded it with a powerful engine (earnings briefing, FY24 Q3) — and positioned himself as the one who would strengthen the base for the next phase of growth. Appointing an administrative executive armed with financial expertise marked a real handover from the first generation after the union to the second. The move from a line of presidents drawn from sales and product backgrounds to one drawn from finance and corporate planning tells of a shift in the group’s centre of gravity, from a period of expansion to a period of building the base.
The Asako regime raised the idea of 360-degree investment: investing with a view five and ten years ahead for stakeholders in five directions — the fans of the IP, employees, partners, shareholders and society — with mergers and acquisitions no more than one means among several, on the premise that any relationship built must be a win for both sides. The handover came against the record results of the year ended March 2025, with revenue of $8.3B (¥1.24tn), operating profit of $1.2B (¥180bn) and net profit of $864M (¥129bn), at a point where the $1.3B (¥200bn) operating profit target set for the final year of the medium-term plan was beginning to look attainable. The move from Kawaguchi’s regime of attack to Asako’s regime of base-strengthening was explained as a change of formation for the next stage, with the plateau in the growth curve in view. It is also a structure in which a finance-trained chief executive takes on the task of setting out how short-term returns to shareholders and long-term investment in the business are to be reconciled.
Gundam in North America and the reshaping of the visual business
In April 2025 Bandai Namco Filmworks America, LLC was established. Branding measures for Gundam in North America are scheduled to move into full operation from April 2026, and a co-investment contract with Legendary Pictures for a live-action film was concluded in January 2025, with production under way (earnings briefing, FY25 Q2). Rather than chasing profit from film on its own, the stated aim is to maximise earnings across the group by combining film with product development, and a structure was put in place under a Chief Gundam Officer in which every region of the world works together to raise the value of the IP. Placing a dedicated film company in North America, the largest market for Japanese animation, took the worldwide development of Gundam from a Japan- and Asia-centred arrangement into a three-pole structure that includes North America. The foundation for tailoring how the works reach audiences to the differing cultural contexts of each region was at last in place.
The visual and music business had long carried a structural problem in the low share of its revenue earned overseas. In the 2025 financial year the group carried through a domestic reorganisation of the business aimed at worldwide expansion, at creating and raising a wider range of IP, and at consolidating its music publishing functions. The Japanese-born Gundam fan site had spread to the point of being viewed in more than ninety countries, and at the 2025 World Exposition in Osaka many visitors bought their first Gunpla by way of the GUNDAM NEXT FUTURE PAVILION, while visitors in cosplay from abroad were conspicuous. Revenue from the Gundam IP has run steadily at roughly $400.9M (¥60bn) a quarter, and a popularity once centred on Japan and Asia has entered the early stage of spreading into the North American region. Improving the overseas share has been a problem for the visual and music business for years, and the beginnings of an answer are finally visible.
The turning points, read in full: what was at stake, what was chosen and what the revenue did around it. The Japanese edition is the edition of record and carries the sourced dossier behind each decision — background, options weighed, outcome — linked under every decision.
Key decision · 1997
The sudden merger with Sega, called off in four months (1997)
A problem of scale settled eight years late
The explanation Yamashina Makoto (山科誠) gave in 1997 — a gulf between corporate cultures — appears to have been only half the truth. The gap between the words offered to the outside world and the internal reality disclosed twenty-three years later reflects the corporate governance of Bandai at the time, in which the will of a single founding family could decide the outcome of a managerial judgement. The wandering of a board that reversed its position twice within the month of May alone can be read as arising from the same structure.
Yamashina withdrew to the chairmanship in exchange for calling off the merger, moved his father and the dissenting directors away from the centre of management, and concentrated authority in his own hands. It can be seen as giving up the name to take the substance. Bandai then spent eight years pursuing the path of a comprehensive entertainment company on its own, and after the joint development of Gundam in 2004 combined with Namco in 2005, taking up the problem of scale a second time. That the merger it could not achieve in 1997 was realised eight years later with a different partner tells how long the securing of scale remained an unsolved problem for this company.
The Bandai–Namco union and the founding of Bandai Namco Holdings (2005)
The author’s view
What distinguishes this union is that its weight lay less on the defensive act of adding scale together than on the offensive one of combining businesses that did not overlap in order to change their quality. Faced with the falling birth rate as a common headwind, many of their peers moved towards addition — gathering up businesses of the same kind — while Bandai and Namco chose multiplication, on the foundation of the complementarity they had confirmed in the joint development of Gundam. Multiplication, though, is slow to show results until the businesses and the organisations have actually fused. The fall in profits and the sharp drop in the share price straight after the union can be seen as the moment when that lag showed itself as disappointment in the market.
The other thing not to be overlooked is that a founder of eighty chose union rather than succession within the family, withdrawing to the position of senior adviser and separating capital from management. In a toy and game industry full of owner-run firms, the way Chairman Nakamura Masaya (中村雅哉) conducted his own exit embodied the pattern in which a founder’s departure becomes the trigger for reorganisation. One reason the union bore fruit in long-term growth appears to be that the founder’s exit left room for judgement to the new management. How the executives who followed filled the twenty years it took for the multiplication to become figures is a question that still deserves examination as history.
The essence of the IP-axis strategy lay less in adding new businesses than in reweaving the toys, games and film the group already held beneath a single character. The vertical silos the union had produced were a side effect of setting two companies side by side. What President Ishikawa attempted, through executives with cross-cutting responsibility and a strategy council, appears to have been to reconnect the divisions in the common language of IP before reorganising the structure itself. The revival of Dragon Ball can be called the symbolic case of that mechanism turning into concrete figures.
The reverse side of the strategy is that the centre of growth depends on a handful of large, established pieces of IP. Cross-category development turns only because assets as powerful as Gundam and Dragon Ball exist; whether new IP can be generated at the same density to become the next pillar remains a separate problem. That President Taguchi and President Kawaguchi have both continued to name the creation of new IP as their highest priority suggests that the IP-axis strategy is not a destination but a mechanism that cannot be maintained without constantly replanting the saplings.
Gathering the high-target business into BANDAI SPIRITS (2018)
What splitting the company showed about growing without growing bigger
In a history usually told as a story of expanding scale, the establishment of BANDAI SPIRITS stands out as a decision to divide the organisation on purpose. For a company that had spent the years since the union accumulating IP-axis management — running several pieces of IP across several businesses at once — bringing in a second cutting line, a brand axis, was no small matter. The originality of the judgement lies in solving the limits of holding two different customer groups, children and adults, inside one organisation not by pursuing scale but by splitting the organisation.
Against an unstoppable structural change like the falling birth rate, the idea of raising the age of the customer within the same product category can be seen as having a generality beyond the toy industry. On the other hand, each time a business is carved out the number of organisations grows, and decision-making subjects disperse in step with the number of brands. How far two measures — the IP axis and the brand axis — can be run at the same time remains, twenty years after the union, a managerial question this company still carries.
This English edition follows the Japanese one chapter by chapter. The Japanese edition remains the edition of record: it carries the source-by-source citations, the financial tables and the shareholder and executive records. 日本語版（詳細）— Bandai Namco Holdings full history in Japanese →
Bandai Namco Holdings Inc. — 有価証券報告書 (annual securities reports), including the 沿革 corporate-history section.
Bandai Namco Holdings — earnings briefings (決算説明会): FY24 Q2, FY24 Q3 and FY25 Q2, on Gunpla capacity, the presidential handover and the North American Gundam plan.
Bandai Namco Holdings — investor interview (IRインタビュー), January 2022, with President Kawaguchi Masaru on four-axis portfolio management. bandainamco.co.jp.