Splitting off the high-target business into BANDAI SPIRITS (2018)

What splitting the company showed — a way to grow that is not scale

In a history usually told as a story of growing scale, the founding of BANDAI SPIRITS stands out as a decision to deliberately split the organization apart. For a company that had spent the years since the merger stacking up an “IP-axis” management — running multiple pieces of IP across multiple businesses at once — to bring in a further “brand axis” as a way of cutting the business was no small thing. The distinctiveness of the decision lies in how it resolved the limits of holding two different customer bases, children and adults, inside a single organization — not by pursuing scale, but by dividing the organization.

Against the unstoppable structural change of a falling birth rate, the idea of raising the customer’s age bracket within the same product category can be seen as having a reach beyond the toy industry. At the same time, every time a business is carved out the number of organizations grows, and decision-making disperses with each new brand. How far the company can keep running two measuring sticks — the IP axis and the brand axis — at the same time remains, twenty years after the merger, a standing management question this company carries.